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- [00:00]
Henry
At the end of the day, everybody wants growth, right? And our job is to ensure, like, how do we grow businesses, especially DTC brands. If you were running a little DTC brand on fidget spinners back in 2020, like your Shopify was going berserk, but the game was on easy mode and today the game is on hard mode.
- [00:18]
Abby
When I'm auditing brands and I see the same ad across each stage of the funnel, there's something wrong. You can't make an effective top of funnel ad until you've identified who your segments are and who are the Personas within that segment. There's tools out where you can make 60 ads in 10 minutes and they look pretty good. Anyone can do that. And that's why the game's getting more competitive. And the only way to win is if you understand your customer and develop better thoughtful, creative.
- [00:51]
Eric Dick
It's all killer, no filler. And I am here with Abby and Henry from the DTC Instagram meme fame. You guys made some really viral videos for us, but you're also leading our account strategy team over at Pilothouse. Welcome to the Allkiller no Filler show. How are you guys doing?
- [01:07]
Abby
Doing good. Thanks for having us.
- [01:08]
Eric Dick
Eric, talk to me about what an account strategist does. What is the account strategy role at Pilot House?
- [01:14]
Abby
Yeah, it's a. It's a good question. I think a lot of people ask that. We pretty much are the bridge between the client and the account teams at Pilot House, but we differ from being a typical account manager, which I think you'd see at a lot of agencies, because we're actually the ones kind of like behind the wheel making the strategy and executing it across accounts. So it's anywhere from media planning to creative strategy, where we think like that channel is most needed. We guide that strategy and provide those insights.
- [01:44]
Eric Dick
Strategy is such an interesting word. It's the word that I'm hearing so much from everyone this year. And I feel like we've kind of come from an era where the technology was so good, you didn't always need the best strategy. You know, you could sort of like just sort of spend into a platform and get results. But I feel like now with all the pressures on D2C brands, you just really need to be sure that your. That your strategy is right really, before you're spending on that. Is that something that resonates with you, Henry?
- [02:12]
Henry
Yeah, I don't know if it's like before you're spending on it, but I think at the end of the day, everybody wants Growth, Right. And our job is to ensure like how do we grow businesses, especially DTC brands. And basically every brand has a goal which usually lies in either profitability or growth. And basically our goal as strategists is to analyze every piece of their e commerce marketing funnel. I guess you could say like everywhere from Google, Meta, you know, are you, are we going on Pinterest? We have YouTube ads, do we even have like TV ads? Because you know, that affects Shopify all the way down to email and essentially come up with the objections basically the direction really of the account team and the whole goal is to find that growth or profitability. So what that looks like is very up in the air, I guess you could say, based on the, you know, account essentially and what that brand is and what their goals are. But to your point Eric, like the game in 2020 was essentially easy. It's like, oh, let's just post like a sticky note ad or like if I just take a photo of this box of my, you know, product. Yeah, yeah, warehouse. It's like we have a four row as and things are going crazy. And what I think a lot happened a lot. Like I think fidget spinners. If you were running a little DTC brand on fidget spinners back in 2020, like your Shopify was going berserk basically. But the game was on easy mode and today the game is on hard mode. And every agency, everybody running ads, doesn't matter who you are, has a limited amount of resources. You only have so much ad spend, you only have so many members, you can only make so many ads, you can only test so many things. And the goal with our job and being strategists is to evaluate like what is the best direction for our team. How do we put all our resources into the things that matter. How do we ignore the nonsense and basically cut through the noise so that we can actually drive meaningful long term growth for DTC brands?
- [04:28]
Eric Dick
And I guess it's a challenge too because you don't always. In a perfect world, a brand comes to us and we pilot House becomes their omnichannel growth team across all different platforms. But I guess in our case we're helping brands in different ways. What happens when we run into things where we don't maybe control their, their Google or their Amazon or whatever, but we're trying to enact like a whole brand strategy? Is that a challeng?
- [04:48]
Abby
I don't think it's a challenge because we always pride ourselves in integrating ourselves into a team's marketing.
- [04:54]
Eric Dick
It's an opportunity.
- [04:54]
Abby
It's an opportunity, right. So I work with brands where we work on their email channel and their meta channel and do CRO work, but we don't necessarily run their Google Ads. So I start to think, okay, well how can I join those Google calls, get insights into, you know, if our top of funnel is great on meta is branded search going up and doing its job properly. And it's more so just as a strategist you're the person that helps provide insights without having channels act siloed anymore. So it's just, yeah, it's a different way of work. But I just try to integrate myself into the team.
- [05:28]
Eric Dick
Can you give me an example of maybe without using any brands of a time with an account where you applied a strategy that maybe, you know, in years past where we didn't have the account strategist role, it would have just gone right into media buying or something. Can you give me an example of a strategy that you guys have employed that really worked Well, I think, you.
- [05:47]
Henry
Know, going back to what I just said about like the game being on easy mode, right, the media buying game, like specifically on meta, it was all about just optimization, right? You run an ad, it has a two row ads. Let's double down, let's scale it. Like how do we make more of these ads? You've launched another one, it has a four row as you keep going right all the way down the spin cycle of looking backwards. But the problem is it's actually easy marketing if you think about it like it doesn't take a data scientist to look at an ad account and see this ad at a four row as so let's make more like it's almost like common logic, not really like genius marketing. And the problem is is a lot of brands, especially brands that come to Pilothouse are looking for now growth and they're usually stunted in growth. So if we're looking backwards at data to make our decisions for the future, but we're not happy with what just happened over the last two years, like we've been declining for two years. Why would we be looking backwards if that's no longer the direction we want to go? And that's really where the genius of our strategists come in, right? Is basically identifying what have we not done, what are the untapped audiences and how do we unlock the true potential of our business, basically. And so yeah, I mean going back to Q4 of last year, actually starting right around this time, August, I worked with a brand and everything in the ad account was 65+. Meta was going 65+. We weren't happy with our ROAS. Our product didn't really speak to 65+, except that's just where Meta was placing us. Because Meta is looking for the easiest conversion and the Pixel was optimized for that. So we identified that basically younger females were going to be our target market. Basically busy working professionals and parents. So we built out a whole framework of creative that tied our product well. First of all, we looked at like the two. We. We had two segments, right? We looked at the main pain points of. I'll just say stick with moms. And like, some of it is that they basically have no time. They do have disposable income because they're working or married and like in a family. So price isn't like the biggest factor. But basically time and providing the best for their family are like the two most important things in their life right now. Especially like new parents. And then we developed a whole bunch of creative, but, you know, and at the time, like, our products solve those problems, but we had no communication to moms in our ad, creative in our brand, etc. Instead, we were just optimized to 65 + because that's what Metta was doing. So we basically built out a whole strategy around how we're going to unlock a younger audience. Yeah, basically built out a ton of ads speaking to younger audiences and we launched them like right around this time. And what turned from like testing campaigns into basically a restructure of the whole ad account. We started like targeting below 65. We started seeing improvements in that segment. And if you look at the ad account for the whole year, first of all, like, our Black Friday turned into the biggest Black Friday ever. Like, we absolutely crushed gold.
- [09:00]
Eric Dick
Got so much bigger.
- [09:01]
Henry
Our audience got so much bigger. I think for all of Q4, like October to December, we were basically up by about 15% through the Q4 from year over year. And I think we were above goals by about 5% in revenue while hitting like our efficiency targets, like our ad spend targets. And what's crazy is you look at the whole ad account for the entire year, every single day. The highest spending audience in meta was 65 plus until Cyber Monday. And for the first time ever, we spent more into 35 to 44. And it just stayed like that from that point on. And it was, it was crazy. I had never seen a shift because most of the time you're like, oh, we're speaking to audiences that are too high. Like, we're 65 plus. So you run a little CGC test or whatever and you try and it's like oh well that failed and it but like you know, a true dedicated strategy initiative.
- [09:57]
Eric Dick
Strategy, strategy shift. Right.
- [09:59]
Henry
And it's not going to happen overnight, right? This is like Even that like Q4, I think that was like as short of a timeline as you could do it in but really like three months, one, two to like get things rolling to like a year to really get things moving. So yeah, that was a really successful strategy. And then to your earlier question, that was mostly done on meta but you now have learnings on meta about exactly how to speak to the audience you're trying to approach. And it's like how can we integrate this into YouTube? How can we integrate this into Google, how can we integrate this into our email and now our motherly emails are going crazy next thing you know, or whatever, right? So yeah, it's really cool what you can learn and apply to the rest.
- [10:43]
Eric Dick
Of the business and it opens up other buying holidays. It's like and I think it's just such a valid point that if you just optimized to the, to profitability, you know, on a spreadsheet you can find yourself worked into a corner. Right. Whether that's whether that's 65 plus, whether you're relying on a sticky note ad to drive, drive all your lower funnel action. Like you really have to think about like what is going to bring new eyeballs, new generations, you know, to, to this campaign. Anything from your side, Abby?
- [11:11]
Abby
I think the other win out of that is like considering ltv, right. So what cohort is going to become like your best lifetime customer and in Henry's case with that product, is it that 65 plus smaller demo that is just cheap on Meta but won't have like a lifetime customer value the same way that a young mom might where she needs to replace the product when she has more kids and thinking of all the different use cases there. So I think that's another thing to consider is just on platform, just looking at Ads Manager, some segments might look really, really good and it might be enticing for a media buyer to go okay, let's 5x spend there and start to cut out some weaker audiences. But just be mindful of LTV and see like where are actually like the strongest returns when it comes to looking down a year or two years later as well.
- [11:58]
Eric Dick
You guys mentioned the department being you know, up in the air is how you describe it. But really it's, it's just Sort of like you're a multi tool. Right. Because everyone's going to come with different understandings of their own strategy. I'm curious like with, with brands that you're working with, are brands coming in with a really well defined strategy that you guys are sort of helping tweak and move sort of based on performance? Or are you finding that brands are still coming in with with what you would like with a sort of il find strategy that you guys are really helping to find?
- [12:24]
Abby
I'd say nine times out of ten the reason they come to Pilot House is for that strategy piece. It's something that we really heavily in the audit process and it's something that we identify as missing as well. And they might think they have a strategy but really what they have done is just creative planning for the rest of the year based off the data. Right. So that's one thing. The other thing where a brand might come in with a strategist already but they just really like us because we have really strong media buyers and they want stronger media planning on their team. So I'd say that they're like a brand would come to Pilot House for both because we have both. But we really do sell ourselves as an agency that provides a strategy and that's what comes first.
- [13:04]
Eric Dick
Are we taking into account things on their side of the business as well? Like contribution margin for instance, like you want to make sure you're promoting the most profitable things. Like I've heard a lot of people starting to manage all of their, you know, paid ads based on like as much incrementality data as they can. So how does that play into our strategy sessions?
- [13:26]
Abby
Yeah, I think like a easy example is product selection. Just looking at like I think I've been on here talking about lifetimely before. Definitely talked about it on Jogo's podcast. But like looking at how can we improve AOV for first time purchases, how can we decrease NCAC on that first order and then what is the product that provides the best ltv which you can track really well using a tool like lifetimely and then using that in your upsell emails or using it in rebuy like making sure that's lining on the PDP or in as like an upsell below the cart button or in your in your car actually. Right. So I think product selections where we get like really sticky with that and making sure that we aren't just marketing something that might have a really good return on meta with like a low AOV because it's easy to convert but it's not creating a good lifetime customer, so it's not resulting in growth in the brand and something that's sustainable.
- [14:21]
Eric Dick
Anything to add there, Henry?
- [14:22]
Henry
I kind of want to circle back, actually, Eric, on to one of your points earlier about brands getting cornered. And you asked, you know, how many brands come to us with a plan. And Abby, I think you saying 9 out of 10 is honestly generous. Most of the time what we see is, I call it the tactical spin cycle. So it's exactly what I described earlier. And you saying getting yourself into a corner is exactly right. Where, you know, they launch a good ad and they just want to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and essentially you're, you're looking backwards and you know, you start to get hooked on like the wrong things. Right. Like, is it the fact that like we use the color blue? Like, how do we, we should be making all ads with blue. And it's like, well, is that actually what you're trying to do here is just make ads that are the color blue? And you know, there obviously maybe are some tactical cases where that makes sense or, you know, using the learnings from your sale periods to make the strongest Black Friday offer. Like, I'm, I'm all for those things, but when it comes to the strategy of the business coming down to like these spin cycles where you're just looking at ads and in basically in the same downward spiral of trying to improve what you once had versus zooming out and even thinking about the culture around your brand and you know, how the world perceives the industry. And like, one of my favorite examples is if you look at pretty much any Instagram of a candy brand, like Dunkin Donuts or like, I don't know, Sour Patch Kids, they're all tapping in on the culture of the audience that their products resonate with. Like, they're funny, they're Gen Z, they're, they, yeah, people are, you know, they, they make great content and they're going viral all the time. Our brand, A lot of DTC brands that are stuck in this spin cycle are just trying to get the next conversion, but they're not making any contribution to like the culture. Whereas if they're starting to touch in on the culture, this is where you get like really aware or brand, you, you develop like really good brand awareness. And, and a lot of our brands just play in that like super bottom of funnel consideration. Even if they don't think they are like, they think they're making top of funnel ads, but really they're making like A, like, people have to be heavily aware of, like, what their product is and what their offer is. That's where I think, like, the biggest flaw is maybe is they come in and they think this tactical spin cycle is their strategy. And it's like, we have to pull, like, way out here and like, go back to the beginning. Like, how is your product even introduced, not just your brand? How is our offer, like, introduced to society? And like, what does America even think about what we offer here? And like, how can we really, like, just make some fire content? That's like moving the culture forward and, you know, leaving our mark on things.
- [17:10]
Eric Dick
Because if you make a reference from a reference from a reference from a reference, it will be a diminishing cycle. Right. And I think we've talked about, I've talked about this with all different, like the media buyers at Pilothouse about how that will happen in campaigns where it'll get a bad signal and then it'll start spiraling down a little bit. I think your example before of just totally expanding the audience to younger women is a great one. Are there any other examples or strategies that we employ to really make sure that brands are getting the right mix of new to returning customers? Because any time you're playing in that returning customer space, that's also when the platforms get the most greedy because they will want to saturate that bottom part of your funnel as much as possible to take your, your, you know, your ad dollars where you really do have to think about strategically, how do I bring more people into that funnel. So any examples of top of funnel expansion that have worked really well?
- [17:59]
Abby
I think what always works well in top of funnel is you can't just treat it like past ads. You know what I mean? Like you, if you look in an ad account and when I'm auditing brands that come in and I see the same ad across each stage of the funnel, there's something wrong. So I would just look at. You can't make an effective top of Funnel ad until you've identified who your segments are and who are the Personas within that segment. So the work that Henry described of, he figured out it was a young mom or like a working mom or whatever his Persona was with that example brand without doing that heavy work. And that comes from the strategy. Your ad doesn't have the line back to like, why you made it. You know what I mean? So, like, you can't just think like, oh, I'm a makeup brand, so I'm gonna follow like female TikTok trends. And succeed on meta. That's not gonna work. You need to figure out, like, what about your makeup brand speaks to that specific Persona and then how do you shape content around that in particular? So at top of funnel, I would do that work first. I do it in each stage of the funnel, but then also just make sure that your messaging is different within each stage of the funnel, or else your funnel will be pretty boring and repetitive.
- [19:08]
Eric Dick
What does an audit look like? This is something I was just doing. I was talking with Dougie on the Google side. But, like, what does it encompass? When you guys get a brand coming.
- [19:14]
Abby
In, there's two things. Typically, we'll do like a technical audit where we're going within the platform because, you know, like, media buying and making sure everything set up for you is done well and effective is still important and it's still going to drive performance. So we start with a technical audit, but more so we don't get into the strategic work until we sign on with you. So what that section of the audit looks like is walking you through what our strategic framework is, what you can expect out of our strategy, and then we dive into. Here's what you're currently doing. It's usually fragmented and the departments are siloed and we see what are the opportunities in bridging the departments together or channels together? I should say. So, yeah, they're usually about an hour long and you get to hear from each department head or a strategist on that audit, and you walk through areas of opportunity within your ad account. And then what we think would be the best path forward with strategy, sometimes it's also opening where a brand comes in and they think they just need a meta audit. But we go and we look on their site and we see a lot of CRO opportunities. So we'll present that to them and say, there's a lot more you could be doing with your rebuy, for example, or there's a lot more because we're not seeing you do any page testing. So you should start bringing in landing pages into your funnels. So it's adaptive to, like, what the.
- [20:37]
Eric Dick
Brand needs and the stage they're at and their level of investment and everything. How big are landing pages in in our strategic approach? I know that's been something we've talked about since the very, very first podcast.
- [20:47]
Henry
I would say landing pages play a role. It basically goes down to what Abby just said there about, like, you still need to have good media buying. I consider landing pages, you know, a part of the foundation and like CRO opportunities, like rebuy, right? Like they, they all play a role, but specifically on the E commerce strategist side of things, like we are looking for that acquisition like net new customers and growth. So really it comes back to like what you were just talking about with like prospecting ads, identifying these audiences and how to best approach them. And if we're really like tapping into a new audience and like really starting to fuel things, like really driving like a lot of new customers to the funnel, we just want to make sure that like we're speaking to them, right. Like, and if we're speaking to them in the right way. So if you go from a 65 plus audience to a 35 to 44, like you want to be adjusting your landing pages so that the messaging that you're trying to get across has continuity across touch points.
- [21:46]
Eric Dick
There anything else from the strategy side of things that you guys would want our audience to know?
- [21:51]
Henry
I think one thing I want to say, everybody, every single client I've ever had at Pilot House over my years, here goes. We just really want strong ad creative. Like we just want better ad creative. It's like how do we get our ads just better? Like how do we get our roas higher, convert more, etc. And I think, you know, everybody has an idea of what better is, right? But what actually is better creative, and this is basically the whole gist of our role, is making sure that we're identifying the right people we want to be talking to. And sometimes you can't look at data, right? And this is why it actually takes really like intelligent wise, like E commerce strategists, because they can analyze everything they're seeing, they can go into the culture. Like we can do research into like what is happening in America and what are the trends and what are the shifts in society that like are adopting this product and come up with the best possible ways to approach those people. Like what, what are their values? How, what is their language like, is it slang, is it proper, is it, you know, swear words? And so now that we know their language, what are their pain points? And how does our product and our brand even solve those pain points? It could actually just be that sticky note ad, Eric. But does that sticky note ad say the right things on it? Right? And does it speak to the right person? So like what a good creative can look like can, can come in almost any medium. Like it can be an animation, it can be a gif, it could be a graphic, you know, carousels. I don't think anybody talks about them anymore. But it could be a carousel. You know, it could be anything you want it to be. But you need to know, like, what the messaging is. And I think every brand is dropping off here because they're just in that, how do we get more conversions? How do we make, you know, is it blue? You know, how do we do more.
- [23:48]
Eric Dick
Of the same that we've already done? Do more of the same. Whereas, like, you got to take that step back, do that deep work and like, uncover who your audience really is.
- [23:56]
Henry
And it's like.
- [23:56]
Eric Dick
And then it. And then it's like, whether you're doing yu. It's like, okay, well, we need a guy with a mustache and a cool haircut or we need. You know what I mean? Like, because that kind of those learnings will go across all your different ad campaigns, all your different marketing. Right. It'll have massive, massive effects.
- [24:13]
Henry
Yeah. And the last thing I'll finish with is, like, why there's so much gray area here. And to Abby's point, like, we can't really get into this work until, like, it's signed is because it takes a long time like that. Everything I just described, like, if identifying the audience that you want to talk to or the highest potential audience for you was easy, everybody would already be doing that and there would be almost no place for, like, the strategist. Right. But doing all that research, doing all the deep work takes a lot of time. And like, usually we have multiple team members supporting that strategist to get to those conclusions. And once you get there, like, and you identify those pain points, it's almost like the ad creative becomes easy because it's like, well, if that's their pain point, I'm a creative. I know how to solve that. And you just start to connect with them authentically. You can make some crazy shifts in businesses. You know, if you're willing to take the time, it's not going to be like, oh, this ad has a four row as overnight. But if you're willing to learn, and at the beginning with 2020, I talked about people winning for the wrong reasons, you can start to lose for the right reasons. Maybe at first, because now you're trying the right things and you're not seeing the results, but then you at least have more valuable learnings and you can begin to start working towards winning for the right reasons. And that's where long term growth is.
- [25:32]
Eric Dick
Abby, what would you add to this?
- [25:34]
Abby
My final thoughts are, I think Pilot House is doing something really cool this year and how we've shifted as an agency historically, I think we've been really known for having the best media buying, and we've been able to come in, bring velocity, win on velocity, and just pumping out ads and being the best media buyers in the room. We have had that and we've built on top of it strategy now, because with AI and the way Meta is changing as a platform and the way media buying is changing, you can't win with that alone anymore. Because if you think about it, there's tools out there that exist where you can make 60 ads in 10 minutes and they look pretty good. And that's where anyone can do that. And that's why the game's getting more competitive. And the only way to win is if you do the proper segmenting and the proper Persona building to understand your customer and be able to develop better, thoughtful, creative. So we're shifting in our creative capabilities and we're shifting in being more of a strategic partner because it's needed. If you need Meta.
- [26:33]
Eric Dick
It's reminding me of one of my favorite documentaries I ever saw. Have you guys ever seen the documentary? You can watch it on YouTube. Century of the Self. It's a. It's a BBC documentary that's actually about the world's first PR firm that was started by Sigmund Freud's nephew named Edward Bernays. He also wrote a book called Propaganda. But basically it was about the very first PR firm was this guy who was like, okay, doing exactly kind of what Henry described. Let's like take our audience and let's go. He was actually using Freud's theories of like, psychoanalysis to be like, what are the hidden drives that, like, that drive a population to. To want something or to do something. And it was just the beginning of sort of capitalism where it was moving out of like, pure utilitarianism into like, people were buying things to kind of form their object, their. Their identities. It's kind of devious, kind of a devious book because it shows you how this level of thought has been used at the highest levels of society to kind of manipulate people. But the one example that I thought was really interesting was. And again, it's devious, but it was taking women. All the cigarette companies were like, women aren't smoking. We need women to smoke. They think it's a dirty habit. And so he arranged a suffragette rally in New York City and tied women getting the vote to their.
- [27:47]
Henry
And.
- [27:47]
Eric Dick
And had them do this big freedom march. And at the end, they all lit up their torches of freedom. And so it's like, it's, it's just really interesting to think the level that you can get to with strategy and, and that has been going on since the very beginning of pr. But, but it is amazing what you can unlock, I think, when you think this way.
- [28:03]
Abby
Yeah, it's like those were the old days in advertising. I'm watching Mad Men right now, and that's all I can think of too.
- [28:09]
Eric Dick
Is, well, this is, this is. There's as, as Henry's talking about this, I, I think I'm thinking of the carousel ad where Don's just like. And the carousel of your family moments and. But it is, it's like it is tapping into those emotions that, that, that make people actually want to purchase and not just always the sticky ad that, that makes them jump. Finally at the, at the last part of the funnel.
- [28:29]
Abby
Yeah, in Covid, there was like the big boom of media buying, I'd say, where everyone was winning because velocity is all it took. But, yeah, we're in a cool spot. We have, like, we still have the talent with the media buyers. Like, they're all still here and they're all doing good media buying. We have the capabilities to execute quickly on creative and now we have an added strategy that guides that ship better. So it's going to be a really interesting year and I, I'm excited to see, like, what we've built and have it come to life.
- [28:58]
Eric Dick
Well, you guys will have to become a more regular fixture on the DTC podcast to talk about strategy. And if you're in our audience and you want to work with these great strategists, then look us up at Pilothouse co. Otherwise, thanks again, guys. This is awesome.
- [29:11]
Abby
Yeah, thanks for having us, Eric.
- [29:12]
Henry
Thanks, E.
- [29:19]
Eric Dick
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at directtoconsumeralloneword co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.