[BEST OF] How to Stop Marketing With Your Ego

Why Most Marketing is Complete Bullshit

Louis: Yeah, French. The Belgium are basically French. They all know this. So I really love your stance on marketing and I think it takes some guts to do it. So first of all, well done on taking the risk to registering such a domain name marketingbas.com and going for it. So why do you think that most of what people do in marketing is complete bullshit?

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah, I think it’s worth clarifying at the beginning that a lot of people see marketing BS and they say, oh, you think that marketing is BS? And I didn’t register. Marketing is BS.com, just marketingBS.com and there is a difference. I think marketing is extremely valuable. I think being able to communicate what your product is to people and having them aware of it is one of the most important things in the business. The famous saying, build a better mousetrap and they’ll beat a path to your door, I think that is BS that does not happen. You can build a great product and no one will ever find out about you unless you put some effort into marketing it. So marketing is really, really important. I think we’ve been distracted by bad marketing for a variety of reasons that I’m happy to talk about today. And that’s what I talk about in my newsletters, what I talk about in my book. It’s kind of what I built my career on, which is stop doing the BS and start doing what actually works.

Louis: So what’s the BS for you?

The Shiny Object Syndrome Plaguing Fortune 500 CMOs

Edward Nevraumont: The BS is usually shiny objects. It’s often we are so focused on wanting to have some sort of answer, and when shiny objects are put in front of us, we chase them. And oftentimes those shiny objects are not effective. That those shiny objects distract us from doing a bunch of simple stuff, which doesn’t sound as exciting or as sexy, but is often really, really important. I’ll give an example. I was meeting with a Fortune 500 CMO. He was talking to me, guys, my advice on how does he integrate his technology stacks between his marketing funnel and his. So he had like some sort of salesforce CRM system and he had all his marketing and Google Analytics and so on. And he wanted to know, how do I find out when one of the customers that are talking to my salespeople, if they visit the website on a certain page, I want to communicate that they visited that page to my sales team so they can like personalize their sales story. And I said, hey, that all sounds fine and good, but take a step back a second. When your marketing team get generates a lead and send it to your salespeople, how long does it take your salesperson to call that lead back? And he just kind of looked at me and he’s like, I don’t know. And I’m like, well, before we talk about integrating marketing and sales tech stacks, why don’t we start by calling your customers back when they want to talk to you? And I see this thing over and over again where customers, where companies are focused on personalization and big data and AI and they are calling the customers, they aren’t responding to customer service requests. And so my take is stop doing all that BS stuff and start doing the effective stuff. And sometimes, by the way, doing the effective stuff can be really hard, but it’s an execution hard, not a conceptual hard.

Louis: Interesting. So execution hard would be like. It’s actually simple to understand, but it takes time and it’s tough to do. Like day to day answering customer service calls on time every time, answering emails on time every time. But then what is considerably hard to grasp could be like AI. It’s a very complex topic, right? Like you throw technology at problem, it’s a vast thing, it’s difficult to understand. But then you don’t even know where to start executing it. So for you, BS is really about this shiny object, right? Like the personalization, as you mentioned. You also mentioned loyalty programs, like you mentioned the AI stuff. And I completely agree with you. So what’s baffling to me, what is really surprising to me is that you talk to the CMO of Fortune 500, I assume very smart person. Most of the marketers out there and CEOs out there are very capable people. Why do you feel they focus on this BS and this shiny object instead of focusing on what makes sense for the business to actually focus on, as you say, marketing effectiveness?

Why Smart Marketers Fall for BS (The Incentive Problem)

Edward Nevraumont: That’s a great question. Especially I’m a big believer in efficient markets that there aren’t many $20 bills sitting on the ground waiting to get picked up. And so if doing non BS marketing is more effective than doing BS marketing, then why hasn’t everyone moved to non BS marketing and BS marketing just gone the way of the dodo? And I think the answer is there’s an incentive problem. So when I was a cmo, I would get calls from headhunters on a regular basis looking for like looking to hire me to be other CMOs at other companies. And the two big questions they always ask me were not how effective is your marketing? What was your marketing roi? They wanted to know how big my marketing budget was and how big my team was. And so if you’re a marketer, cmo, and you want to get your next big job, my recommendation for you is find a way to get a really big team and a really big budget and that’s how you’re going to get your Next, bigger job. One way to get a bigger team and a bigger budget is to be more effective in marketing. But it’s not the only way. And I would argue it’s not even the most effective way. And so once you get to a certain scale in your size of a business, it’s really hard to measure effectiveness. And it’s easy to BS effectiveness. A great example of that is retargeting. Everybody loves retargeting. Vendors love retargeting. They do Last touch attribution on retargeting. Someone comes to your website and then you cookie them. You follow them around the web with your ads. Some of those people click on those ads, come back to your website and buy, and you give the retargeting the credit for that purchase. Well, if someone’s already on your website, some percentage of people on your website are going to come back and buy from you in the future when you stick retargeting ads next to them. All you’ve done is provide a navigational tool and you aren’t actually getting incremental sales. Now, some of those sales are incremental. And I’ve run tests against this where you do retargeting, where half the people see your retargeting ads and half the people you just show Red Cross ads and you measure what the actual lift was and the actual lift ends up being small. There is a real lift, but it’s like 10% of the impact you think you’re having. But if all you care about is growing your marketing budget and all you care about is making it look like you’re effective, if you’re an agency, you say, hey, look at this. Your ROI on your retargeting is 1000%. And then the marketing person says, oh, I can spend a lot of money on that and I can go to my CFO and say it’s 1,000%. And the CFO says, well, why isn’t our business growing? And they go, oh, it must be someone else’s problem, not marketing. Look at this. My marketing attribution says what I’m doing. It’s extremely effective. So there must be some problem in sales or product or somewhere else. And a lot of marketing is like that. It’s hard to measure. And the people doing the measuring, the people doing the coaches and the referees are the same person. And it’s easy to kind of gloss over what’s actually working and what isn’t, especially when it gets complicated.

The Retargeting Scam and Attribution Lies

Louis: I love the fact you’re talking about retargeting. In fact, that’s one of the lessons I’ve learned from David Heinemeier Hanson, who’s the co founder of Basecamp and one of the first episodes of this podcast more than two years ago, he talked about this bullshit of retargeting. And I like the fact that you’re mentioning this. Massive businesses are being built on this technology. Right. So to explain it simply to people who might not know what it is, it’s simply a way to show ads to people who’ve shown interest to you in the past. They might have visited your page or your homepage and you basically show them an ad that basically tell them to come back. And as you said, this technology works well, but it does not necessarily create new incremental customers. And that’s because if you are interested in a product, you’re going to buy from from them anyway. And if you saw an ad, you might click on it, but it’s not going to make you buy necessarily from them. And you mentioned this test you’ve done, which is a 10% lift, nothing compared to the biggest ROI those companies tend to talk about in terms of retargeting. So that’s a great example. Do you have any other example of this technology or a solution or something that marketers tend to really focus on that seem to work, but actually doesn’t really bring a lot of effectiveness?

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah, there’s lots of things that are like these complicated things that I harp on. Sometimes they work, but they work on a small amount on the margin some of the time. And it’s not that you should never do retargeting or you should never do personalization or you should never do loyalty programs, all of which I think are generally bs. It’s that you should not start there. You need to start on a bunch of simple stuff first. And by the time you get to personalization, you better be friggin good at all the basics because personalization is not going to help you very much. It’ll help you if you do it really, really well. It’ll help you a little tiny bit, but it’s not going to blow away your business. Personalization is a great example. I look at Amazon. Amazon is one of the best personalization companies in the world because they have so much data on you, purchased across so many categories. And they have. I live here in Seattle. I know a lot of people working in Amazon. They hire really extremely smart people to go and, and work on this stuff. So you’re probably not going to be as good as Amazon at personalization. And yet if you go and buy a printer on Amazon, the next thing they recommend is you buy another printer. They’re the best in the world at this stuff. And if you buy a toilet seat cover, they think you’re collecting toilet seats. If that’s the level that Amazon is at after investing in this, like crazy, how good is the personalization effort that you’re going to do? Be so what do you do instead? Well, why don’t you start with instead of doing personalized content, why don’t you try to create some good content? I joke about this all the time too. How many companies do you subscribe to their email list where you’re excited to get their email every time they send it to you? The only people on email lists are there because the momentum of unsubscribing is too hard and they just basically keep it on the list and they don’t open it. Open rates on company based emails drop down to about 10%, sometimes as low as 8%. They never seem to drop below 8%. There’s always somebody who’s going to open them, but people, there’s no value there. People hate the stuff. And so what do we do? We try to optimize by changing the subject lines and changing the scent line. You talk to content marketers, they’ll say, oh, the number one driver of open rates is the subject line. Well, that is true at the micro level, but on the macro level, if you have an awesome subject line, your open rate might jump from 10% to 12%. But meanwhile, a newsletter emails that you send out to your people, listening to your to read it, listening to your podcast, probably have open rates of 70% or why? Because not because your subject line is awesome, but because you’re sending out good content that they want to read. And so if you’re a company, before you start worrying about personalizing your emails, why don’t you just try to create a good email? And if you can create a good email every week, you should send that to everybody, not a personalized email to anybody. And if you can send out two good emails a week, well, instead of sending out two personalized emails to half of your base, just send out two great emails to your whole list twice a week. People will be very happy to read a great email. They’re not going to be happy to read a personalized crappy email.

Louis: So before we go into the basics, and what are the basics for you and how to do it, because I’m really curious to know how you would do it step by step, especially a Business that tend to focus on the bs, making them go back to basics and convince them to do so. But before that, I just want to come back to your experience. So you’ve been chief marketing officers in a few companies, VP of Marketing, Expedia. You obviously have experience with big companies and you’re not saying that from a perspective of a freelancer. Only started yesterday. Right. So you have a lot of experience there. Why do you take such a stand? Were you doing this type of BS when you were in these companies and realized on the late that actually you had to do things differently? Were you doing marketing like effective marketing from the start and you were just baffled by all of the other companies doing it differently? What’s the story behind this fight that you have?

From McKinsey to A Place for Mom - Learning the Hard Way

Edward Nevraumont: Yes, I went to business school at UPenn, at Wharton School. And when I was there, I trained under some very, very smart professors doing some very, very cool stuff in marketing. And I came out of business school really excited to do the stuff that they taught me. I started my career post business school at McKinsey and I was traveling the world helping out companies and I was just pumped to basically be like, hey, I can go in and help these guys do customer based valuation so much better than they’re doing right now. But then I’d walk into these companies and the problem wasn’t that they weren’t doing this stuff well. The problem was they weren’t doing good stuff at all. It wasn’t a matter of like improving their customer lifetime value models. They just didn’t have customer lifetime value models. And so I spent a lot of my time at McKinsey charging ridiculously high fees to these companies to get basic stuff set up. One of my favorite stories, I was doing a churn reduction program on prepaid wireless plans. So this is like you don’t even know when the person cancels. They just stop using the phone. And then if they haven’t used the phone for one day, if they churned or what if they haven’t used it for a week, at what point do you know do you think that they’ve actually stopped using it? So you’re trying to build these models to predict when the person is going to churn and if you wait too long, they’re totally gone and you can’t get them back. And if you go too early, then you’re subsidizing them for people that wouldn’t have churned anyway. But we’d build these models out. We were working across six different countries and we’d build the models out. Then we create programs for churn reduction. And then we’d roll those programs out and we’d test them to see what would work and what didn’t. And we finally found a model that worked. Took us a long time, almost a year project. We finally found a program that consistently worked in a few different countries. We started rolling it out across all their country network and it was working everywhere except for one country. We couldn’t get it to work there. We kept trying to change things and modify things. We’re like, looking, is the culture of that country different? What’s going on? And finally I sent my analyst to the country and said, hey, I want you to work your way through the whole thing from the beginning to the end to figure out why this thing isn’t working at this country. And he spent a ton of time looking at the model, figuring out if there’s any problems with the model, working with like, understanding the customer base, see if they’re significantly different than the customer base, segmenting the customer base, see if it was working with some segments and not others, and it wasn’t working with anybody. And eventually after a couple of weeks of like working through the system, he figured out that their machine that sent out the SMSs wasn’t plugged in, wasn’t working. They weren’t sending the messages out. Their system was telling them the messages were going out, but they weren’t actually going out to any people. We were charging half a million dollars a month to this company and they hadn’t plugged their machine in. And so those types of things happen all the time. And the challenge isn’t like, how do we build a more sophisticated model. The challenge is like, let’s make sure our computers are plugged in. And So I left McKinsey to go to Expedia to kind of do this in house. And again, it was the same challenges. It was so easy to get distracted by advanced segmentation stuff. Meanwhile, we were sending out emails to drive attribution rather than to actually drive performance. And so a lot of it was like, how do you deal with the incentives within this big company to make sure that we’re doing the right thing rather than trying to figure out what the right thing is? When I got to a place for mom, I was lucky enough to be at a company where everything was broken. The basic foundation of the company. Effectively, it’s a company that helps you find senior housing, senior housing referral service. So it’s called Expedia for senior housing. And they had the, if you understand Marketplaces at all. They had the marketplace set up so they had more inventory, more properties, senior housing communities than anybody else. And once that happens in a marketplace, it’s really hard to beat you. But they were doing everything else wrong. They were less the Expedia for senior housing and more the Craigslist of senior housing. There was just so much to do that we had to focus on the basics because the basics weren’t there. And it made me learn how many basic things there were in order to get something to work and how hard execution was and how when you fix one thing, something else breaks. And by the time I left a place for mom, I started helping out other private equity backed companies in that kind of like 20 to $200 million revenue range and began to see the same parallels everywhere I went. Whether the company was like a marketplace for lawyers or a software tool for urgent care clinics or enterprise solution for security. They all had the same issues where they weren’t answering the phone and we had to go and find a way to help these companies answer the phone.

Louis: Right. Super curious to know. So those basics, as you said, from your experience working for different industries, different maturity level and all of that, it seems like all of those companies struggle with the same stuff and they don’t have the same basics in place. So let’s take the scenario of when you joined Expedia for senior homes as you mentioned, where everything was broken. Right. And let’s take this scenario and let’s talk about the steps you took to actually fix things. Because you actually turned things around quite drastically in this company. So what is the first step that you took? What did you put in place that wasn’t there before?

Edward Nevraumont: Oh man, there’s so many things. Actually the number one problem when I was there was there was one guy doing marketing and he was doing it terribly. And so there was lots of opportunity around marketing. But the bigger. It’s interesting when like you think about that, there’s like nobody thinking about marketing. But that wasn’t our biggest problem. Our biggest problem was our sales organization where at the time we had 450 advisors who were turning over at 80% per year. Our reviews on Glassdoor were one star reviews consistently across the board. It was just a mess of a sales team. The compensation structure was 100% commission. So could you imagine going up to a good salesperson and saying, hey, I want you to come leave your company where you’re making good money. Come and work for our company where it’s a new industry. You’ve never been in before. Our current salespeople hate the job. They’re giving one star reviews on Glassdoor and leaving every year. Trust us, Come and work for us. Well, no good salesperson was coming to us at all. We were left with the people. We had some good salespeople, but we tended to find the good salespeople we had. We got just almost by pure luck. Oftentimes it was stay at home moms who were trying to get back into the workforce and were having a hard time getting jobs. Well, we would hire them because we hired everybody. And some of those people were very, very good. And so we had some very great salespeople. We also had people who would sign up to work for us. We’d send them their computer and then they would disappear and they’d basically using us as a steal computers. It was just a disaster. So we had to go and totally change the compensation system. I had to totally change even the workflow. So those salespeople were doing everything from call screening. They were working with families, they were doing property signup, they were doing property management, they were doing hospital relationship management and they were doing collections. Like you ask one person to do all those jobs and you’re not going to find a good person. So we had to split that job into six different jobs. Create a collections department, create a centralized call center, create a property management team, create a property signup team, create a hospital relationships team so that we can focus our salespeople. And actually doing the sales job of like working with families and you try to do all that while the ship is flying. Like if you built this business from scratch, that’s one thing. But like we were an operating business and we were spitting out $40 million in revenue a year. We couldn’t afford to like stop that. And so you try to change things as you go along and all the changes you’re making are for the better. Now, we made some mistakes, but in general we were on the right track. But even when you’re doing the right thing, change hurts you in the short term. And so we were living with this world of we couldn’t change too much because if we did, our company would go bankrupt and there would no, would be no future. But if you didn’t change fast enough, well, there’d also be no future. And so balancing all that together and it felt a little bit like we were that little kid in the Dutch dike where you’re putting your finger in to stop the water from coming out and it would spit out someplace else. And it was a Solid year and a half of struggling to make that work and making sure we had payroll every two weeks.

Louis: So if you had to advise people listening right now, who might be struggling in their marketing, right. They might be in a company that struggle as well, not generating enough revenue. From your experience, Dan, apart from, as you said, fixing the sales team like you’ve done for this company, what are the basics, marketing wise, that they need to set up to have in place that you, from your experience don’t really see what are the things?

Step 1 - Turn Marketing Into a Profit Center

Edward Nevraumont: So that’s actually what I do a lot right now. I help out a company called Warburg Pincus which is a private equity firm. They have hundreds of companies in their portfolio and I help a lot of those companies get their marketing stuff set up. And I like to think tell them that it’s kind of a three or four step process where the first step is stop thinking about marketing as a cost center and start thinking it as a profit center. Which means you need to tie your marketing costs into revenue. You need to know that every dollar I’m spending, I’m making back more than a dollar with some sort of way to tie those two together. And sometimes it’s never easy, but sometimes it’s relatively easier than others. So your money you spend on paid search, you should get really, really good at knowing that this click I get on this ad turns into this many visits to my website, this many leads, that many leads turns into this many sales qualified leads which turns into this many opportunities which turns into this many sales. And the average sale value of this is X. Measuring that full funnel with some sort of attribution methodology is extremely important and you want to do the equivalent of that across all of your marketing spend. The higher up in the funnel you go, the harder that is. But it’s never impossible and you should at least have a what you believe you’re going to spend $100,000 to do rebranding, you better believe in your heart of hearts that’s going to generate more than $100,000 in value. Discounted cash flow basis. Discounted cash flow basis. And if you don’t believe that, then you should not be spending $100,000 in branding. Anything lower in the funnel than branding, you should have a much better idea of what that those numbers are so you get confidence around all of your spend. When I got to General assembly, they were spending $100,000 a month on Snapchat filters and I said, does that work? Do we have any idea? This is adding any value? And they said, well, we don’t know. That’s why we’re only spending $100,000 a month on it. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not the way. You can’t do that. You want to know if it doesn’t work, we should spend zero. And if it does work, we should be spending a million or $10 million a month and we should be capping it out as much as possible. But this, I don’t know if it works. Therefore I’m just going to throw a little bit of money at it is never, never, never a good idea. So you need to find some way to have an estimate or a belief anyway of what value something is providing per dollar spent and then scale the ones that are and reduce the ones that aren’t.

Louis: Okay, so excellent. Thanks so much for going through this first step you mentioned, paid search. Paid search typically is the kind of easiest to tie back to revenue and ROI, right? Because Google, like Google AdWords and analytics and all of that gives you a lot of good attribution metrics. So you can see how many people search for this keyword, how many people click on your landing page, how many people convert it, et cetera, et cetera. So it sounds like even with Excel, just an Excel spreadsheet and napkin calculation, you can get an overall view of you put $1 into your AdWords, you get $2.5 back or whatever, $10 back. Right? It sounds like easy enough. Right. But then when you start switching to channels that are a bit more complex, maybe content is another one, maybe event is another one. Maybe as you said, brand, like this type of higher purpose campaigns, how do you advise those companies to tie everything together? What’s your process for that?

Measuring Complex Channels - Email Attribution and Beyond

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah, so you made a good point. Start with the easiest stuff. So make sure your paid search is doing it. Most companies I talk to are not doing that well, or if they’re doing it at all, they’re doing it at the gross level where they have like a line on their spreadsheet that’s called paid search, and they do it for the overall channel of paid search and with no level of granularity. You really want to get to the point where you’re, you’re not doing it at the keyword level because you’re not going to, you’re not going to be able to learn anything at that level of granularity. But there’s somewhere between that, the whole channel of paid search and the level of an individual keyword. And you need to be able to tie those together and figure out, hey, I’m spending a dollar to make $10 here and I’m spending a dollar to make 50 cents here and I can scale up the $10 and scale down the 50 cents. You gotta get that right. And yes, it’s easier than the other stuff, but man, companies struggle with it. So get that going first. Then once you have that, you can kind of work your way up the funnel. So the second part of the second type of leads that you get are leads that are leads or customers where, where you get their email address but they don’t buy, they don’t turn into a lead. Like Maybe you’re a B2B company and you have a white paper and they download the white paper. You’re basically creating like awareness in the category without, but you’re not driving an immediate purchase. At General assembly we had a guide for how to get a job in a startup. We made no money on that. We got an email address. So now you need to figure out your email attribution programs where I collect an email address. What’s it cost me for that email address buy marketing channel, what activities am I doing to that email over what period of time and what percentage of those emails over what periods of times turn into leads, which then turn into revenue down the line and it’s further back in the funnel. It takes you longer to measure that your feedback cycle is a lot slower. But you have early stuff early on in the funnel that you can at least start to figure stuff out and you want to create ways to make that attribution happen. So if you have that white paper, you could gate it or not gate it. Well, the nice thing about gating it, the thing about not gating it, is that you expose it to more people and you create more brand impact. But by gating it, you collect the email address, which just helps you a ton on your attribution down the line. And even if you give up gating it later on, you can start measuring a impact per view of the white paper so that you can quantify that value down the line. And so I’m a big believer of doing things the example I gave of the red cross, you’re not going to do all your retargeting where half the ads are going to be red cross, you’re throwing away half your budget. But doing it once or twice to get the, the measure of the incremental lift of the retargeting is really, really important so that going forward I can take away the Red Cross ads, but still assume that 90% of those clicks are invalid.

Louis: Okay, so paid search, we talked about email, so let me just rephrase it in my own words, making sure I understand right and correct me if I’m wrong, please. So we collect, let’s say, 1,000 email addresses from white paper using a CRM of some sort of way to track those emails. Like, let’s say we send them a campaign of 10 emails over the course of six months. And after six months, we realized that 20 of those 1,000 actually turned into customers. Right. And so what we do here is we look back at the cost it took us to create this white paper potentially. And then we also look at the value that this customer brought. And then we basically look at, okay, from 1,000, we got 20. This is the return on investment. Is that roughly what you’re talking about?

Edward Nevraumont: That’s exactly right.

Louis: Okay.

Edward Nevraumont: And it takes time, right, because you collect the email address now. They’re not ready to buy now. So it takes you some time before they turn from an email into a lead. And so you don’t have the fast, iterative feedback cycle you might have on paid search. Even if you use paid search to generate leads or paid search to generate revenue, it just, it takes longer. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. And you need to take the early funnel metrics, which is just, hey, collecting the email address. Do they open the second email you send them, like anything early on the funnel, that creates an estimate of what that’s going to be down the line.

Louis: So then we are getting to more and more blurry territory. So let’s say we receive, like, we get a lot of referrals. Let’s say we get a lot of word of mouth. And typically what would happen here is you might have a lot of direct traffic coming to your site. You don’t know where the fuck they’re coming from. They land on your homepage, they convert. How do you then tie that back?

The TV Synergy Multiplier Effect (5x Hidden Returns)

Edward Nevraumont: I call that every channel has a multiplier. It’s either a synergy or cannibalizing. And so for retargeting, that cannibalization rate is again, could be as high as 90% branded paid search is another example of a really high cannibalization rate. If you put your brand up, if you advertise on Google on a branded search, like name of, like everybody hates marketers.com, and you advertise on Google for on the keyword everybody hates marketers, your paid search is going to come at the top. And the next thing should probably be your organic SEO. People will click on your ad. But a lot of those people would have clicked on your SEO ad anyway. So high cannibalization rate. Other channels have a really high synergy rate. Best example of that is television. You run a TV ad, no matter how good you are at attributing the impact of that television ad, it’s going to have impact beyond what you’re able to measure. At A Place for mom, we did a lot of television. We had Joan London as our celebrity spokesperson and we did everything we could to attribute that television spots. And we did pretty direct response marketing TV spots like, hi, I’m Joan London, you should get senior housing call now to get some senior housing help. We put a phone number on the spot on the TV spots. Anytime anyone called that phone number, we could attribute that back to the TV spot. We have a dedicated phone number for every TV spot we ran. We could tie those together. It was really obvious. But that was only a small percentage the impact that came from tv. But the bigger impact came from a branded lift we saw in our brand traffic the day, the same day the phone number phone calls came in. We saw like a super high correlation between lift in branded traffic and number of phone calls on any given day. But it doesn’t stop there. We also saw long term brand lift from our television spots because it was the only brand advertising we were doing, only top of the funnel stuff we were doing. So any brand traffic lift we knew that’s where it was coming from. And so over the course of the next 12 months, we got as much lift in brand traffic as we did on the day the TV spot ran. And so now we’re looking at three effects we have like the effect from the phone, from the phone calls, the effect from brand traffic lift on the day you ran the ad and the same day you got the phone calls and you got the brand traffic lift over the next 12 months. But we’re not done there. Now we have the fact that like Google has made it very, very clear they love branded companies because there’s a brand trust when you’re a brand versus like some fly by night organization. So our unbranded SEOs started lifting during the same time period. Now was that because we had an SEO team that was doing all sorts of great work and. Absolutely yes. But the other impact of it was that our television was lifting our unbranded SEO. Our click through rate on our paid search was going up. Again, if you’re looking at Paid search. And you look at, you search for hotels in Seattle and one ad is from Expedia and the other ad is from hotels-four-u.com, like which one are you going to click on? Well, you’re going to click on the brand. And so as our brand grew, our click through rate on paid search went up, which our quality score went up and our cost per click went down. But it doesn’t even stop there. Recruiting employees got easier, signing up, supply got easier, partnerships got easier. And so the impact of television was one, the directly measured phone calls, two, the indirectly measured brand traffic on the same day, three, the indirectly measured brand traffic over the next year, four, the Lyft and our other marketing channels. And five, like non marketing impact, like HR impact and regulatory impact. And so the synergistic effect of our television was at least 3 or 4x what we could actually measure at the time. And so once you kind of get this synergistic or cannibalization rate, you can apply that to all of your marketing. So when I advertise on, when I do remarketing, I better be getting at least a 10 to 1 return that I’m measuring, because I’m not, then I’m actually, I’m underwater because if 90% of that traffic is cannibalized, then I need to get at least a 10 to 1 return on television. Though if I’m getting a 5x synergy, if I’m getting a 20% or a negative 80% return on television, I’m actually breaking even. So a negative 80% return on measured television impact was the same as a 10x return on retargeting.

Louis: Okay, so thanks for this thorough answer. Let me deconstruct it. And by the way, I think you’re the first person I’m talking to who makes the word synergy sexy again. So thank you. So let’s say we spent 1 million euros or dollars, let’s say dollars, $1 million on a TV ad. And the direct return I got on the day the ad runs is only $200,000, which is minus 80% ROI, because you’ve done your research and over the course of a year, you know that the lift is basically five times. So whenever the direct response you get from the ad, actually the actual maximum impact is five times higher than that through all of the snowball effect that you had, you basically have $200,000 multiplied by 5 equals 1 million. So you go back to your original investment. That’s what you’re describing.

Edward Nevraumont: That’s exactly right. You may or may not want to do that. If you’re spending a million dollars now to make a million dollars over the next 12 months, that’s probably not good enough.

Louis: But if you are making 500,000 instead of 200,000 and you know for sure that the lift is 5x, then you’re like, fuck, that’s good return. So how did you actually. And then we can move on to step two of your process. But for those very high level kind of ad stuff, how did you compare? Because you need to have a before and after. Right? So you just basically say, before we run the ad, this is the status quo. After we run the ad, this is what happens and nothing else changes.

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah, so it gets. It’s hard, right? It’s not obvious, it’s not easy. And the bigger your brand, the harder it gets. We were small enough when we started television that every time we rent our TV spots we saw a short term brand pump that happened on the same day. I guarantee when Coke runs a TV spot, they don’t see any lift in sales the day they run the TV spot. And it’s not because the TV spots aren’t working for Coke and they’re working for us. The reason is that Coke’s base level of brand, base level of purchase levels was just so much higher that the noise overcame any signal from their TV spot. And so the solution is to, at least initially, is to have a high enough spend and a low enough base that you can actually measure the impact. And so TripAdvisor did this. So did I want to say Zillow where to test their television spots? Instead of running national TV spots, which were before far more cost efficient, they did intense TV buys in one specific city. And so they saturated a market to see whether or not they could see a lift in traffic in a specific city by spending intensely on TV and then not spending anywhere else. And so from that they can kind of measure all those indirect effects and see what’s happening. We did something similar at General assembly where we did intense subway buys in different cities. And so we could see what lift we’re getting from the cities we’re buying. Subways versus subway ads versus cities that were not.

Louis: Yeah, I like that. So that you really target a local market, meaning that you don’t influence, you’re likely to influence any other market around. And you can really do some sort of a, a B test in a sense. Right. Like local market A gets the ad, local market B doesn’t. Same population, roughly, same type of people. We see 50% more branded search compared to this one after the ad is running. So you basically do a real life a B test as much as you can measure.

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah. And again, it’s not going to be perfect at all. No scientist is going to love what you’re putting together. But it’s enough that you can get a rough idea of what that synergistic effect is. And you still want some sort of attribution stuff. So General assembly, we still ask people when they come in the door, like, how did you hear about us? And we still put a special code on a URL on the subway ads. And so we have some sort of like measured attribution from the subway ads. But then we see what the overall lift in the market is for. Like, okay, the subway ads said that they made us $20,000 in sales, but the overall market, when we ran the subway ads, lifted by 100,000. So we know our estimate of the multiplier effect on what we can measure versus what’s actually happening is a 5x on the subway ads. And then once you have what that multiplier is in the cities that you run those tests in, you’re not going to run those tests everywhere. You’re not going to continue to run regional television and pay a premium for that. You just kind of have to like, close your eyes and cross your fingers and join hands and say, hey, we believe the synergistic effect on how we’re measuring television is 5x. So let’s go out and spend television all over the place, measure what we can measure and believe that the impact is going to be 5x greater than whatever we’re measuring.

Louis: Yeah, that’s really, really interesting. Makes me think a lot about a lot of stuff. So I hope that’s helpful for you if you’re listening to this episode right now. So that’s kind of when you said when you came back to talking to those startups that you advise, this is kind of step one. We’re not going to have time to talk about so many steps. But, like, the depth you are going into is super interesting and I want to keep going for a few minutes anyway. So once they know roughly that like, marketing is now a profit center, they understand whatever money they spend, they get that out. Once they have that basis, what steps to what you like to do after that.

Step 2 - Kill the Losers, Scale the Winners

Edward Nevraumont: So step two is now that you have all of these marketing channels and you know what your return is on these marketing channels, you’re gonna find some marketing channels where you’re spending a dollar to make 50 cents. And so the first step is, stop doing that, is just turn off all these channels where you’re spending a dollar to make 10 cents. Turn off your Snapchat filters, like turn off like the, like you said at the beginning, your egotistical channels, right? Like there’s a lot of times marketing as dollars are being spent with your ego. You really like the local sports team, so you buy the jersey sponsorship on the sports team. Turn all that shit off. Then step two, step B, I guess of step two is find the marketing channels where you’re spending a dollar to make $10 and on those channels just start spending more. Accelerate. Take all that money from the ones that aren’t working and throw them into the ones that are and see how much you can accelerate those channels before you start hitting diminishing returns. It’s not uncommon when I help with these warbird companies where I find this marketing channel where they’re spending, oftentimes it’s paid search are part of paid search where they’re spending a dollar to make $10. And the answer becomes like, let’s instead of spend a dollar, let’s spend $100 and make $10,000. And we just push, push, push, push, push. And we find ways to push more and like tricks to kind of push those channels. Finding a marketing channel that works really effectively is really, really hard. You probably have some right now that you’re not measuring. As soon as you find them, just don’t let up. Just push them as hard as you can. And it’s the easiest thing to do because you’re not trying to figure anything out at that point. You’re just like doing what already works.

Louis: And chances are then once you squeeze as much as possible from those channels, you might reach a local maxima, you might reach a plateau, right? So it’s not like these magical beans where you find out that one channel does generates 10x the investment, the initial investment, and then you can just multiply that by the 1 million and you’ll be a billionaire.

Edward Nevraumont: Right?

Louis: There is always a limit. So how do you handle that? And I don’t want to derail you too much from the step that you’re taking. But do you see that happens a lot? Or do you see that usually there’s a lot? The plateau is really high and you have a lot of ways to improve.

Edward Nevraumont: So there’s always diminishing returns. There has to be, right? Like as you said, no company can grow faster than the growth rate of the world for very long before eventually they become. If they couldn’t, they’d eventually take over the entire world. Right? Like, and the growth rate of the company would become the growth rate of the world. Right? So you have to. Diminishing returns is a fact of the universe. The question is, when is that diminishing returns and when is it going to happen? It often, for whatever reason, and I’m not sure exactly why this universal rule is true, but I see the square root rule all the time where once you get to a certain size in a given marketing channel, you can always double your spend. And if you do, your revenue will go up by the square root of 2. So every doubling of spend makes your. What’s 1.6 or whatever that number is, whatever the square root of 2 is. 1.4, 1.5. I should know my math better. But that square root of 2 rule happens again and again and again. You multiply, increase Your spend by 10%, your sales will go up by the square root of 1.1. So that’s kind of like your rough kind of diminishing returns curve. Sometimes you’re lucky and you’re early enough in the funnel that you don’t hit those diminishing returns for a while yet. Like, diminishing returns are probably there, but you can’t see them. But once you get to any sort of reasonable deal scale, that’s often what happens. Your diminishing returns are always going to be there, but you want to push them as far as you can. And the bigger your percent. So if you’re making 100x return on a channel, man, you could have lots of diminishing returns before you run into trouble. If you have like a 10% return on a channel, you’re probably pretty close to the boundary of diminishing returns given what you’re doing right now. Which gets me to step three, which is like, do what you’re doing better once you find the places where there’s like gold in them there hills. Get better pans and get better pickaxes and focus your attention on your big channels that have high roi. And I know I keep going back to paid search, but it’s probably the easiest one to talk about paid search in general. People do it terribly. Again, go back to the thing we talked about at the beginning. They chase shiny objects and they don’t focus on the basics. Agencies are focused on spending your money, not on being more effective. The way agencies get more clients is that they have really good sales teams and really good customer service teams, not really good marketing teams. It’s actually a struggle for agencies that are really good at marketing. I’m sure they get frustrated because if they get better at marketing, they don’t get more revenue. They need to get better at sales and better customer service if they want to grow their business. And so paid search is just done terribly across the board. I find we go in and we take these channels and just do them better. It’s improve your site speed, and all of a sudden your SEO will get better because nobody’s been looking at site speed. It’s on paid search. It’s making sure that your ad copy matches the keywords people are typing in, which is, again, very easy. If you’re selling red umbrellas in Austin, you just make sure your ad says, red umbrellas in Austin. Now, again, most of the time, people use creative ads, and they don’t do that. So it’s fixing that first and making sure all your ads just repeat the same words the person types in. But then doing that at scale is really hard. So if you have 1,000 products in a thousand cities with a thousand colors, all of a sudden you’re in millions of ad copy, and that’s difficult to do, and most companies aren’t doing it. So we do that next. And when you start fixing these different marketing channels, as long as they’re scalable marketing channels, you’re not wasting your time. One of my favorite stories, when I was a consultant, we were helping out a grocery store and helping them improve their operations. And they were stacking bananas. And we were just following these stackers around through the store and watching what they’re doing. And when they were stacking bananas, the system on stacking bananas was to go and create the bottom layer of the pyramid and then do the second layer of the pyramid, third layer of the pyramid. They kind of work their way up to the top of the pyramid and make the stack the pile of bananas. And we timed them doing it, and then we said, hey, let’s try this. Instead of working your way around the kind of like layer by layer of the pyramid, what if we just took one row of the pyramid and did it from the bottom all the way to the top of the pyramid and then go to the next one, do the bottom of the top and bottom of the top and just work your way around. Instead of doing multiple circles to stack the bananas, you just kind of, you do one circle around one time by stacking all the way up to the top. And we found out that by doing that, it saved like two minutes on the stacking of Bananas, which again, if you’re an 1 grocery store in one place, you probably don’t care. You’re paying your staff member minimum wage. Whether it takes like 10 minutes to stack the bananas or 8 minutes stack the bananas, you don’t really care. But if you’re a national grocery chain with thousands and thousands of stores, you take two minutes off the stacking of bananas across all the stores, all of a sudden you save $2 million a year. And so once you get things up to scale, small improvements can make a big, big difference. And so you find your biggest channels that are already effective and you focus on, you focus on making your improvements there on the margin. And those marginal improvements all can have significant impact on your business.

Step 3 - Optimize Your Gold Mine Channels

Louis: So how do you prioritize such improvements? So let’s say we have like, let’s say five marketing channels that are positive, working very well, and then underneath, as you said, are multiple things you can optimize. How do you like to prioritize? Okay, this is the first thing we need to do. This is the second thing we’re likely to do, et cetera, et cetera. What do you look into?

Edward Nevraumont: So, one is the scale. You focus on your bigger channels first. Second is your roi, so you focus on the valuable channels first. Third is the insights you already have from other places. So figuring out something new is really, really, really hard. Copying something that already works someplace else is comparably much, much, much easier. And so where you have like a toolkit of things that you’re not doing right and someone else is doing someone else is focus on that first because it’s a lot easier to have impact. Once you get to top levels of performance, people look what gets you there is very different and isoteric by business. Every business is different. And every business is different in its own way. Every industry is different in its own way. And it’s hard to kind of take findings from one place to another. But the basics are the same everywhere. Like the idea of like, hey, call your customers back when they want to talk to you is the same whether you’re in travel or you’re in car sales or you’re in education provider. Everyone wants good customer service. And so if there are things you are doing badly that other people are doing well and had significant impact, fix that stuff first before you start thinking about like, okay, what, what’s the over the top thing we can do to really, really go to the next mile? And it’s less sexy, it’s less interesting, but man, it has a big impact.

Louis: Yeah, I mean your CV speaks for itself, right? You’ve done amazing job for a lot of companies. So clearly what you’re saying has a lot of value for people listening right now. So you mentioned customer service as a basics. What are the basics? Do you feel like the foundations are not there apart from that?

Mass Marketing vs Targeting - The Byron Sharp Debate

Edward Nevraumont: So figure out who your customers are that make you money and treat those customers really well. And what does treating them really well mean? It means meeting their needs and being convenient for them. Coke had a thing back, I don’t know when it was the 80s or so. They said their mission was like every Coke should be within, every human should be within arm’s reach of a Coke at all times. That was their mission. My wife was actually climbing a mountain in Ethiopia. Hardly anybody was there. She didn’t see anybody in the mountain all day long. It was her and her guide and her friend that she was hiking with. And they got to the top of this mountain in Ethiopia and there was a guy at the top of the mountain selling Coke. He had climbed the mountain earlier that morning and he was sitting at the top of the mountain with Cokes. For anyone who climbed to the top of the mountain that day, my wife doesn’t like Coke, but you know what? She drank Coke that day because Coke had distribution. And so if you can find a way to meet your customers, meet your customers where they are, make it easy for them, reduce transaction costs, make it more seamless. Should you have your product be self service on the web or should you have call center people they can call or should they be able to do it via text? The answer is yes, yes, yes. Some customers want it one way, some want it the other way, some want it the other way. You want to make it easy for anybody to buy your product any way they want to buy it. That’s, that’s the big thing is like how do you take out, reduce friction and make things easier for people to give you their money?

Louis: What’s your number one method to identify your most profitable customers or the ones that are like, you know, the 20% that make up the 80%. What’s the one method you like to use?

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah, so I don’t want to go too far along that route because Byron Sharp has done a great job writing this book called How Brands Grow that if you haven’t read, if you’re a marketer, you need to read that book. So much of having really valuable customers is having lots of customers. You go and acquire a whole bunch of customers, some of them will be really good and some of them will be bad and the bad ones will go away and the good ones will stay with you if you do a good job. And so the way to get more good customers is just to get more customers. The idea of like trying to target and find the needle in the haystack, don’t do that. Just get a lot of haystacks and you’ll find a bunch of. There’ll be a bunch of needles in there. Now once you have those really high valuable customers, you need to do stuff that makes it easy for your entire customer base to work with you and buy from you. When I say you’re good customers, I don’t mean your top 20%, I mean your top 80%. Your bottom 20% are probably distracting you and getting in your way. But you need to make your service awesome for the 80%, not the 20%. If you focus on that 20%, you’re often wasting your time in that your top 20% of customers love you already. And they aren’t going to churn. They aren’t. Almost by definition, they’re not going to churn. If they’re high churning customers, they’re not your top customers. And so the top customers are the ones who are going to love you no matter what you do and they’re going to stick around. And investing in them is almost like retargeting a little bit. Because if you measure you do a bunch of stuff to your good customers and your model says, oh my, good customers are still good. Well, that’s true, but they probably would have stayed good even if you hadn’t done anything for them. Instead, think about what your mass customers are doing. Make their lives easier. And it turns out if you make the lives easier for your mass customers, lives also get easier for your best customers customers. And they’ll stick around, increasing the chance of them sticking around just as much as the mass, only you’re affecting a much larger base.

Louis: But if you have a mass marketing strategy where you target a bunch of people who don’t necessarily share the same demographics or psychographic, how do you make sure that the message sticks for them? How do you make sure that you have a marketing that is sharp for every of those segments? If you don’t have a lot of cash, wouldn’t it be better to focus on those 20%?

Edward Nevraumont: You got to be really careful. I think demographic and psychographic targeting is also. It’s one of the chapters of my book on BS marketing. You got to be really careful. If you want to sell tennis rackets, you could try to Target by demographic, but far better is to sell to people who play tennis. The behavioral targeting is much more effective than demographical targeting.

Louis: Absolutely.

Edward Nevraumont: And far more effective than psychographic targeting. And so by all means, like if you’re selling tennis rackets advertised in a tennis magazine, but be really wary of like hey, our audience skews male and aggressive. Therefore we’re going to advertise in like a guns and Ammo magazine because lots of men read that magazine. Well, maybe, but you’re going to pay a huge premium CPM to go and target those people. And you’d be far better advertising at a far broader rate.

Louis: So I mean, I personally would define psychographic. To me it encapsulates as well the behavioral stuff because their beliefs make you. But okay, you’re making a distinction between psychographic and behavioral stuff. So you would make a distinction between psychographic and the job they’re hiring the product to do or the type of stuff that they would do that make them like the one thing that make them together as a group. As you said, tennis racket. They play tennis. But then things get a bit trickier about, let’s say you want to buy a car. It’s not as easy to understand the behavioral thing behind it. Maybe people tend to buy a car when they move a house, for example. But I would still consider that to be psychographic. So for you there are two different things, the behavior and the psychographic.

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because behavior is something you can see that actually did that thing. And psychographic to me is like something that you’re trying to infer based on something. And man, we’re really bad at inferring stuff. Our false positive rates and our any small group we’re trying to target with has really, really high false positives. So you just gotta be really careful. Now you can use that to rule out people. It’s far more easy to rule out people than rule people in. So if you want to, it’s much easier to figure out who isn’t pregnant than it is to figure out who is. If you can get 10% better at figuring out who’s pregnant and you say, okay, these are the people that are most likely to be pregnant, let’s exclude them from our non pregnancy ads. That’s far more easier to do than be like, okay, these are the people we think are pregnant, let’s go and target them with pregnancy ads. Man, that second one doesn’t work very well.

Louis: It’s getting better and better. I want to keep pushing just a bit on this so I know that the book you mentioned from How Brands Grow, and I know if I’m not mistaken, I think Mark Ritson, Baron Sharp is the author of How Brands Grow. Right. Baron Sharp is, as you said, Byron Sharp is.

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah. And Mark and Byron get in fights all the time.

Louis: Yes, exactly right.

Edward Nevraumont: I think they agree on 80% of stuff, but they fight about the 20% that stuff they disagree with.

Louis: So if you had to summarize this, the different the two point of view is that Mark seems to be more about like, select the right target market and go after them, while Byron is more about have a mass marketing strategy and you will have the right people in the mix. Is that it? Is that the difference between the two?

Edward Nevraumont: I think so. I think I might get killed for saying, I think Mark is probably a little more nuanced than Byron. But I think Byron basically says, like, in some ways he has figured he has a hammer and it’s a really great hammer that no one else had before. And now he’s hammering things with nails. And hey, 90% of the time he’s right that his hammer is doing great stuff. He may have overcorrected a little bit. And I think Mark is a little bit of the hey. Providing nuance to. To Byron to be like, hey, sorry, Brian. Maybe it’s a little bit arguing that he goes too far in some cases, which is probably true. I think the risk just becomes like when I used to teach swimming lessons to kids, and when you’re trying to teach a kid how to swim, you get them to overcorrect because the natural tendency is to like, drag your arm through the water. So you get them to throw their arm way, way, way out of the water. Now, if you’re one of the best swimmers in the world, your arms barely come out of the water. But that’s not how you teach kids. You teach them to throw their arms way, way out of the water so that they get you overcorrect their natural tendencies. And I think marketers definitely need an overcorrection a lot of times.

Louis: What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years

Edward Nevraumont: to do the stuff that worked 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. I think, again, we’re so focused on what the next big thing is, and we still haven’t learned the lessons of what worked from 50 years ago.

Louis: So basically, everything you mentioned before, right in this episode, what are the top three resources you’d recommend listeners? So it could be anything. Books, podcasts, Conferences, anything at all.

Edward Nevraumont: That’s tough. For a long time people would ask me like, what book do I need to read to become a cmo? And the answer I always gave was like, I don’t know, it doesn’t exist. I think How Brands Grow is a great, great resource. It’s a correction to a lot of the BS that’s out there. When I was a VP at Expedia, I bought a copy of the book for my entire team. I think his second book, How Brands Grow Part 2, is actually a better book. In theory, it’s more about luxury goods and international markets. But in practice, rather than just being about here’s all the things that are bad he talks about, here’s what you should do instead. And so I think it’s a more readable, effective book for most marketers. I think you should be subscribing to my newsletter. I talk about this stuff every week. It’s a deep dive coverage of something that’s happening in the news that ties back into what it really means for marketers. And then I would read non marketing stuff. I think a lot of the insights I get are from things that are not marketing specific that you can pull, that you can pull stuff from that are helpful to you. So instead of reading another newsletter about content marketing and how you need to create a top 10 list and here’s how you trick people into filling out your emails and so on, read something like Stratechary, where Ben Thompson does a deep dive into tech strategy and you’ll be able to pull marketing insights out of that. Read Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cohen where he talks, I don’t even know exactly what he talks about. Lots of different things every day that I pull insights from all the time. And I think reading non marketing stuff is probably going to be more helpful than reading a lot of the marketing things.

Louis: I concur. Yeah. And I would say yeah. Again, if you’re listening to this episode, do subscribe to Ed’s newsletter. A lot of wisdom there. I’m definitely going to read How Brands Grow. I haven’t read it yet and I’m sorry. I will, I promise. You’ve been super helpful. You shared a lot of stuff no one has ever talked about in this podcast. And I say that with entire transparency and honesty. So thank you so much. I know that people listening got a lot of value out of what you just said. Where can people connect with you, learn more from you?

Edward Nevraumont: Yeah. So hey, marketingps.com is my website. Go ahead. You can send me emails on there if you subscribe to my newsletter and just reply to a newsletter I read, everything that comes up comes my way. I actually just purchased a new company a couple of weeks ago called ipassexam.com, which is a resource for passing practice tests for Google Analytics and Google AdWords certification, Facebook display Ad Certification. So if you’re planning to take any of those tests, feel free to use my new website. I’m still trying to figure it out myself.

Louis: Nice. Once again, Ed, thanks so much for your time. Learned a lot from you. Thank you very much.

Edward Nevraumont: Thanks.

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