Welcome to the art of marketing operations, a tailor podcast. Here you can
grow your knowledge about marketing operations, listen to ideas and strategies to help you
scale, grow and optimize your efficiency, drive your speed to market and enrich
your work life. Let's get to it. Welcome to the art of marketing
operations, a tailor podcast. I'm Glenn Bottomley and today my guest is Jeff
Campbell, president at Ai Commerce, a global digital marketing agency with a focus
on e commerce in retail marketplaces. Thanks for joining me today, Jeff.
Thanks, Glenn. Going to be here well, Jeff, you have a
powerful early career highlight in that you supported the worldwide launch of the original Apple
iphone. That's amazing. Can you share more on how that came about and
maybe some of the lessons that you've learned from that experience? Yeah, absolutely,
that was. That was a wild one in my career. Um You
know, apple was a client of mine back in two thousand six and I
was leading the digital media supporting itunes and IPODS and rest in peace, and
iphones and uh, really a focus on page search and S C oh and
really extremely lean on the client side of Apple. Um Our mean client was
in charge of the worldwide launch of the first iphone and then the subsequent models.
Um. What an organization, right, extremely secretive, project code names,
details not shared with partners until public launches. I remember going to their
marketing uh, their marketing offices. There were no windows, full escorts,
India upon India, Um, but the lessons I learned with the years you're
working with with apple were strong. I think the biggest one is the importance
of branding versus online R O I. I've been a digital market for twenty
five years. Data is King, looking at return on ad spend and and
R O I is clutch. But that was a client that was really into
branding and you know, it shouldn't surprise me that that they brought kind of
their offline and traditional media psyche over to the digital marketing. But it was
about ranking number one. That was their goal. It wasn't about ROAS and
CPCS and conversion rates. It was about number one. And again makes sense
because they wanted the best billboards in the United States and the world. They
wanted to be the first commercial of every commercial pod. They wanted to be
on the inside, front cover, the back cover of the magazine never in
the middle. So, you know, not surprising that they were focused on
brandon. Again, look where they are today. So it seemed to work.
But even in S C o I remember having a conversation that went all
the way up to Steve, which was h you know, at the time
everybody searched for laptops, not macbooks. Mac books weren't really a household name.
People didn't know what it was. So I'm making suggestions to change some
title tags and some website Merbiage and use laptops. And boy, that was
a no. No. They wanted the brand of macbooks and only macbooks.
I'm like, what about a page of like laptops versus Mac books and why
they're different, so we can start ranking on some of those keywords. No,
but again, um, really good to see the branding I and I
think that will really work for him and probably a great lesson for many marketers,
as we'll talk about today. Um, the balance of branding with direct
response in our O. I. Oh, that's fantastic. What an outstanding
career experience. Uh, that's that's gonna stick stick with you for years and
years. So thanks for sharing that background. I appreciate that Uh. Now,
when when you and I chatted in the past, you've mentioned that you
know you can't, can't automate everything, uh, in marketing, and that
in that marketing professionals, you know, we we have to strike this balance
between people, process and technology. So can you just expand a little bit
more on what you mean by that and how does that balance come about?
Yeah, absolutely, you certainly need all three to succeed in marketing and digital
marketing. People, process and technology. Our industry changes so quickly. U.
We weren't talking about Tiktok or go puff last year, two years ago,
right. But to succeed that fundamental experience, both the people in the
process of targeting, so thinking keywords, audiences, interest, and then the
optimization techniques, the bids, the budgets, the row as, the q
a process. They're fundamentally Um, similar, the same. But then each
platform is going to have some nuances, right, and they're going to need
unique process and unique technology. Um. Second many worry about, you know,
US, are the marketers, the optimizers, the hands on keyboards being
replaced by technology or AI. Just not really the case. Um, I
see it as an enabler, right, it enhances our work to allow us
to focus on higher value tasks, right, and those age old marketing questions
of how do you balance brand awareness with direct response websites versus Amazon and sales?
How do you drive offline sales with online marketing? As new platforms emerge
and there's more pieces to that marketing Pie, what pie pieces are gonna Shrink
and how should that overall pie grow? Um, that's that's something that is
going to take some human gut intuition and experience versus technology. And I've used
tools like market holdout testing and and MT A, multi touch attribution and media
mixed modeling, which directionally help, right, but those all look backwards.
I mean here we are now where gas prices are at an all time high,
Um, and that's probably hurting people's or limit many people's visits to different
physical stores. Those models and technology couldn't have really planned for that. And
if more consumer dollars are going to gas, how's that going to affect sales
for your business? Again, there's some technology that's going to help, but
you're always going to have that that balance of people, process and technology to
make these smart decisions in marketing. M H. I think that's an interesting
comment that you bring about, uh, you know, gas and then the
impact on consumer and consumer spend and share of wallet. That is fascinating.
And you mentioned a moment ago Amazon and you know, there's there's something that
I thought that I remember when we chatted before that I thought was fascinating because
you shared with me that seventy four percent of consumers conduct product research on Amazon
versus conducting that originally on Google. So, with Amazon being such a large
search engine now for product information, et Cetera, how do you then,
uh, I don't recommend that marketers balance the this conflicting goal of I want
to stay visible on Amazon and I want, you know, high conversion rates
or you know, but, but maybe I receive less information about my buyer
because Amazon is holding that information back. But I also want to expand my
company's standalone presence on my own e commerce site. But maybe I have lower
conversion rate, but I have more first party data, you know, about
my buyers. So this is an interesting conundrum that I think, you know,
businesses are in right now, particularly with, you know, Amazon.
But this consumer piece, it's a it's a fascinating balance. So how do
you recommend that you balance ease too? Right, and that's that's a definitely
a multimillion dollar question there. But you're correct. According to jungle scouts,
se consumer products searches now start on Amazon. Um. That's that's got to
be shocking and keep a lot of google executives up at night. But,
as as you mentioned, there's whereas I mentioned earlier, there's only so many
marketing advertising dollars to go around. So you have to be pretty strict and
clear with your long term and your short term goals. Right, and you
mentioned a lot of those, Um right before. And you know Amazon and
marketplaces are for instant gratification, for immediate sales. Right, instant gratification of
revenue and row as or turn on ad spend. But unlike your website,
you lack control to respond to reviews or have a relationship with customers. Right,
lifetime value, repeat purchases, cross selling, those are all extremely difficult
with marketplaces because you don't have that relationship and that may be more important to
you, Um, as you launch your your brand and Bill Awareness. Again,
going back to that apple example versus having that immediate sale tomorrow. Further
Amazon, you know, is almost built against the overnight millionaire right. They
want to have a good customer experience and they want to make sure that people
that are using their marketplaces can fulfill and delight customers. So Amazon can take
six to eight months and maybe a hundred thousand dollars of an investment, just
as if you were to open up a retail scorefront down the road. Um,
that investment is required before you've got their flywheel spending through proven customer satisfaction,
the trust and fulfillment and inventory supply, quality of reviews and, most
importantly, as strong velocity of sales. So you know, there's there's some
important considerations. Um, you know you you need to think about if you're
building an Omni channel brand or are you just trying to drive sales quantity with
the low cost item? And that's that's really some of the initial kpis you
need to think about when making some of these decisions. But there's pros and
constant both, for sure, and big considerations. But no doubt, you
know the old saying fish where the fish are. It seems to be Amazon
now that's where the consumers are headed first. MM HMM. Yeah, that's
that's really fascinating information. But you know, staying on this, uh,
this topic of Amazon. Uh. What I find is fascinating is how you
know the experience that we have, particularly you know within business, that the
experience that we have as a consumer. For example, you know Amazon's one
click. Uh, you know the how how easy and streamlined it is.
Uh, you know one day shipping, et Cetera, these experiences about how
easy or frictionless it is to use the site like Amazon. How that consumer
experience then uh spills over into our B Two b buying experience as well,
uh, and therefore our own experiences and expectations u have increased on how an
interaction with a B two B company should be U in their own day to
day work life. So can can you share a little bit more about how
should we look at this phenomenon and you know, and what advice can you
give to marketing operations professionals and how we should approach this experiential Um comparison between
the B two c live and a B Two b life? Yes, yes,
so, in terms of Amazon, they do have a B Two b
portal, so you can create a free account of business dot Amazon Dot Com
and it offers quantity discounts and price comparisons and more and as a business you
can promote your business profile and use some of the keyword targeting, but it
is a little limited in terms. If I just want to focus on on
B two B consumers or people that are logged in in their in their B
two B account, but I would assume that's that's coming shortly um off Amazon.
B Two B buyers are are typically using personal emails to log into social
media and more so it's very difficult to target them on those platforms outside of
using cookies, which we know are going away, in some interest targeting or
some contextual targeting. Um. And then in search, consumers and business purchasers
really search the same way with the same key whigs, very difficult to distinguish.
I work with lows for for many years and we'd always joke that the
search for paint people. You know, the consumers or businesses search for paint
rollers. Right. They don't search for massive amount of paint rollers. For
my business of painting houses, I wish they would, right. It would
have made it a lot easier. So you'd have to take an approach.
In that case you'd have lows dot com and you'd have lows for pros dot
com probably both needing to be bidding in the in the paid mix and ideally
optimized for the organic mix for those those different types of consumers that again are
searching the same the same few words. And then finally, the advice is
linked in. You know, remains probably the best place for targeting Um titles
people at certain companies, etcetera. But their CPCs are are very high,
Um, double triple some of the other platforms I mentioned and because of that
Long B two B sales cycle, it's it's very difficult to measure that success
or that R O i. But again, that's probably your best targeting option
for the world to be two be so more options are coming. I think
we'll we're kind of wait and see to see if Amazon can really go hard
into this B two b space, but they are certainly rolling out of platform
and and improving it um pretty quick yeah, no, that's uh, that's
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Now, you know, as the president of of a e commerce uh you're
responsible for obviously business operations across you know Gosh everything, client services, digital
activation, finance, sales, obviously marketing. Uh So, can you share
some of the best lessons that you've learned about how you instill a culture uh
and expectation for growth and scalability across so many diverse internal teams? Absolutely,
absolutely so. Um My my previous agency, a couple of US started it,
we grew it's about eight hundred in the US and thousands globally. Um
So scalability is something that's always in my mind and some of my team,
I'm sure, it gets a little frustrated when I'm they're doing something for the
first time and I'm like, you need a formal process and you need to
you you need to really, you know, get the logos on there and
make it beautiful, professional and reusable. But that's that's got to be a
big focus for for scale in this in this place. But you know,
my role is to help my team achieve great outcomes for clients and their teams
and in themselves. And probably the biggest way I do that and achieve a
culture is through transparency and just the definition of success right, ensuring my team
knows what it is and how to achieve it. Um, specifically shared and
published goals. I love the okay our philosophy, the objectives and key results,
the John Door book, if you haven't read it or read a read
a quick excerpt. Or why the video and how Google does it on Youtube.
Um. And so from okay RS and understanding the company goals to team
goals to individual goals and the connectivity all the way to like profitability bonuses.
Everybody at the company should be rewarded as we're making money, in my opinion.
So I think that helps a lot. And then hiring, you know,
smart people and never freating the people process technology, but the people is
really our biggest cost and what makes us successful, so to quote Hamilton's young,
Hungary and scrappy, right, resourceful and action oriented folks. And I
think those smart people will build the culture with you and for you. And
Uh, it's worked so far in a couple of different forms. That's excellent.
I want to just kind of dig in there a little bit, Um,
because the one thing that I hear, as you were describing that,
is alignment, uh, and that everybody's sort of growing in the same direction.
But also you mentioned process, and can you, can you dig in
on that process a little bit more about, you know, what are some
of the things that you've seen about what makes you know, building a culture
for you know, scalability and how you create a process around that? Right,
right. I mean you hire an agency for again, those three things,
people, process and technology. And from a process standpoint, knowing that
we've been there and done it before, Um, really is going to make
somebody more successful. You know, I mentioned Tiktok or go puff earlier.
You, you can fumble your way through it. You, you as an
individual, can log into their interface and and probably make some mistakes and,
you know, mess with some things and you know you'll probably figure it out
way more efficient to hire a third party that's done it before. But again,
if that third party doesn't have a process that, you know, makes
it more scalable and you're just dealing with some new individual who actually hasn't run
campaigns on that platform or doesn't have best practices or doesn't have formats, or
or the trainee Um, you might as well do it yourself right, so
that that's just so crucial for our business. Um to come in and really
be that that resource and be reliable in performance and again giving clients that head
start because we have worked out some kinks, we have found the best technology
right, we have we have found found the best ad types and add types
to avoid Um, so we're not spending their money on learning as they might
themselves directly. MM HMM. That's that's great. Thank you. Let's stay
on add advertising there for a little bit. I remember reading Um something that
you had published in the past about the importance for for e commerce marketers to
calculate a break even row ads or return on ad spend. Uh, and
you encouraged marketers to understand their contribution margin and to utilize margin based bidding to
maximize revenue at break even contribution margin levels through algorithms and you know, optimizations,
et Cetera. So can you just unpack that a little bit and then
share you know if or even how those approaches can be used in potentially non
e commerce marketing environments. Yeah, absolutely. So you know, simply put,
not every sale is a good sale and that that's so important. And
so many marketers will chase the sale without understanding kind of the profitability of the
margin of that sale, what it took to get that sale and then maybe
even the lifetime value of that sale. Most sellers also don't know why they
gave you a row as goal. Right, so again, twenty years of
doing this. Hey, go hit a six dollar row as well. Why?
Why? Six dollars? Like, okay, but tell me, how
did you get to that? And usually it's well, we've been at five
dollars and we want it better. Well, okay, you know. Have
you? Have you done the analysis to understand what your cost good, solder
Um, do you understand the you know, maybe there's some commissions for Amazon,
maybe cost of keeping your website up. Have you baked in all of
those variable costs to understand what your contribution margin is and therefore what your real
ass goal is, because you might find out it's it's three dollars and over
three dollars you're breaking. Even so, by having a six dollar goal,
you might be leaving revenue and sales on the table because you're trying to be
overly efficient, which you might not need to do right. So that's that's
so important. And then, you know, online or offline Um, you
know, looking at the variable cost the marketing dollars, the promotions, Um,
making sure that you understand what variable contribution margin is and you stay margin
positive. And that's again up to that that seller, or client in my
case, on the strategy of how high um they want to go. Many
startups are very happy with a low single digit Um, you know, contribution
margin or variable contribution margin, because they want invest in growth. Other more
storied companies might need to be in the in the profit stage. So t
is what they aim for. So again, going back to you know,
that that marketing pie and all the pieces of where you can put your money.
You know, that's that's something that's so crucial to understand, whether offline
or online, all those costs that go into the into, you know,
the cost of the goods that are sold, but also into the selling costs,
shipping, fulfillment and more, to really understand what your break even is.
And then look at your channels. If immediate sales is your goal,
which ones are going to be the most profitable and then maybe which ones have
scale with a small profitability. Um. So that that that's, I think,
crucial. And again going back to not every sale is a good sale.
It's important to do the math. Yeah, well, and also,
to your point, important to understand that the timing and also the maturity of
the product and or ultimately the strategy that you know what is the most important
for you right now. Um. So I think that's great. Um.
Another thing that I read, Um, that that you had written, and
I actually wrote this down because I thought this was really powerful. You wrote
a common pitfall for most e commerce first brands is over focusing on advertising at
the product level at the expense of lower converting upper funnel add types. Product
advertising is an important part of the mix, but shouldn't represent the entire mix.
Successful companies will build a brand cross sell in measure lifetime value. So
you've talked a lot about brand. You know, we started, uh,
this today's episode talking about the importance of brand with with apple. Um.
So can you share just some more background about the brand building and how that
can again apply to both e commerce first and non e commerce brands? Absolutely
so, Um, it's it's somewhat crazy, but the disruptors are becoming disrupted
right. Well. Well, many of the established brands were late to the
game. They have now adopted these direct to consumer practices and they're actually representing
more of the growth in in the category than the digitally native brands. Right.
So the successful sellers on Amazon, or to be success on Amazon,
you probably need three things. One, is a very strong differentiator, um,
that you know. That makes sense right. Second is a known brand
that has qualities that you'll pay up for or third, the lowest price.
So these these traditional brands, are established brands, certainly are well known and
people are willing to pay up for him. And the supply chain, from
gas prices to you know, Covid lockdowns, is tightening up, Um.
But the majority of of Amazon sellers in the last year, I think upwards,
are China based. So they're taking out some of the middlemen and they're
they're beating some people on price by quite a bit. So where do you
fit in that? I think that's so important. So these digitally native brands
need to scale, right. So what worked in the past to kind of
get them where they are have now become crowded and expensive. Um, they're
not working like they used to social media, which is really the primary channel
where most consumers are encountering brands, connected TV influencers and and then not being
overly data driven or the keys to future success. And again, that's really
the playbook of the traditional brands where you know they've they've been doing TV and
billboards and built that brand and some of these digitally native brands need to take
advantage of of of that. And again, the non e commerce brands need
to continue, if they aren't already going towards the D two c practices like
Amazon and thinking about online sales versus Omni channel for for a second of their
business. Mm Hmm, I'm going to remember that that line. disruptors are
now being disrupted. That's excellent. So you know, Um, would you
say, is there a strategy that e commerce brands are using today that you
disagree with? Yeah, you know, I'll give you to one. One
I hit on pretty hard was generic role as goals. Right, not a
client comes in really in my history that hasn't given me a goal that that
wasn't justified or or the math didn't lead them there. was based on past
performance or you know, some financial goals, but not not like mathematically driven.
So that's the first that. The second is Um doing what they did
and probably Google and many and facebook and many others, and that's having different
silos between organic and advertising or kind of the paid performance on Amazon. And
Amazon is very different. You know, a couple of years ago I was
I was managing a billion dollars with Google and annual spend top top one of
their top three of their clients and spend, and I would I would call
them and say, Hey, could you help me out a little bit in
the organic side? We're spending a lot of money. UH, and they
would slam the door hang up the phone and you know, good for them.
Separation of church and state. Amazon polar opposite. The more you spend
on Amazon, the better your organic rankings get. So while you know your
your paid ads might have a bad row as, the more you spend your
organic rankings are actually growing. So you need to look at like the total
performance of Amazon, and that's going to give you that true R O,
i. That total row as, if you will, across those channels.
And again, very new to the to the you know, traditional digital marketers,
if there's such a thing now. I've been doing this for ten years
because of the color was that separation the how much you spend did not help
your organic rankings. Those days have changed, and so that's a that's another
mistake, common mistake I see, of a lot of ECOM folks as they're
looking at the silo of advertising and not thinking about the impact on organic or
taking advantage or looking at the profit that it's driving on the organic side and
and factoring that into our Oy. So in a sense it's almost an x
y access where the more that you're spending, you have to find sort of
the sweet spot between you know, how much you're spending versus what the organic
benefit is that you're gaining from that, the revenue that you're gaining from the
organic compared to the revenue that you're gaining from the paid and you know in
trying to map that sort of perfect sweet spot, is the way to think
of it. Yeah, it's a new it's a new formula where Roas with
sales divided by cost Um, now it's ad sales plus organic sales divided by
ad costs, and that's really marketers need to be looking at. In the
world of Amazon and it works inversely. You know, if you cut your
budget by you will see organic rankings go down as well. Um, kind
of, you know, crazy to see, but I mean if you're Amazon,
they want somebody that's going to take advantage of all their different platforms and
programs and add types their promotions. They're, you know, they're they're different
ways to connect in social and more, and they're going to reward you by
taking advantage of that because they feel like it makes a better customer experience and,
you know, maybe maybe help somebody get to space. But that is
that is the rules we're playing by now. MM HMM. That's a great
example. Are there other examples of uh, Um, you know something that
an e commerce brand is not doing that you would recommend? Yeah, it's
it's probably the overreliance on Rowans. So I realized I'm talking a little bit
out of both sides of my mouth, but you know, you need to
build a brand and that's that's what I said, is the disruptors are being
disrupted. Um, you know, take of team percent of your ad budget
and say, Hey, I'm not going to overly focus on data, um
in rows and return and I'm gonna experiment and connected TV and building my brand
and talking about the attributes. Um. That's that scenario where I think it's
probably harder. You get hooked on those sales and again, the endless supply
of sales with Amazon just, you know, continues to grow every year.
Uh, it's it's tough to kind of get off that crack and say hey,
we need to we need to think long term and build a brand,
versus just continue to, you know, focus on single products, searches and
advertising. there. Sure, what chef? Before we wrap up today's episode,
what is the main takeaway that you would like to leave our audience with
understanding the challenges facing marketing operations executives today? Yeah, so I'll repeat myself
a bit. Not every sale is a good sale. Understand your costs,
a good soul, your margin and your break even points, and that's going
to allow marketers to be the most effect with their media dollars and their and
their partners selections. Excellent. Well, that wraps up this episode of the
art of marketing operations. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jeff,
and until next time, stay safe, take care and thank you for
listening. Thanks glad. Thank you for listening to the art of marketing operations
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Until next time,