305 - Customer Acquisition Playbook for 2025 with Joey Steger, VP of Marketing & Ecom at Alen

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Marketing Millennials - Episode 305: Customer Acquisition Playbook for 2025 with Joey Steger, VP of Marketing & Ecom at Alen

Introduction

In Episode 305 of The Marketing Millennials, host Daniel Murray engages in an insightful conversation with Joey Steger, the Vice President of Marketing and E-commerce at Alen Air Purifiers. The episode delves deep into modern customer acquisition strategies, offering actionable insights for marketers aiming to enhance their efforts in 2025 and beyond.

Setting the Stage: Alen's Marketing Landscape

Joey Steger begins by outlining the state of Alen Air Purifiers when he joined two and a half years ago. At that time, the company primarily relied on word-of-mouth, occasional press mentions, paid search, SEO efforts, and some affiliate marketing for customer acquisition.

Joey Steger [01:08]: "When I joined, the business was relatively stable, but the acquisition of new customers really relied on a lot of word of mouth and a couple press mentions."

Leveraging his prior experience with a supplement company, Joey spearheaded the expansion of Alen's marketing channels. This included activating Meta (Facebook and Instagram) advertising, utilizing Critio for display and retargeting, reinforcing retention mechanisms with Klaviyo, and integrating OTT and CTV capabilities. A significant milestone was the implementation of Triple Whale, a multi-touch attribution software, which revolutionized their approach to measuring and optimizing marketing efforts.

Rethinking the Customer Acquisition Funnel

A core theme of the discussion is the evolution of the traditional marketing funnel. Joey explains how initial efforts were funnel-centric, assigning specific channels to distinct funnel stages. However, platforms like Meta and Google demonstrated that their campaigns dynamically interact with various funnel stages, making the rigid funnel assignment ineffective.

Joey Steger [04:00]: "Platforms like Meta and Google... have campaigns that you input a lot of creative elements and they dynamically serve that content to customers."

This realization led Joey and his team to adopt a campaign-centric approach. Instead of mapping channels to funnel stages, they classified campaigns based on their funnel impact and assigned specific ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) metrics to each campaign type. This strategy ensured a balanced and efficient distribution of marketing spend across different funnel stages.

Joey Steger [05:00]: "We started doing kind of turning the funnel on its side, looking through the lens of campaigns and determining what type of campaigns exist in different parts of the funnel."

The Importance of Top-of-Funnel (ToFu) Investments

Joey emphasizes the critical role of Top-of-Funnel (ToFu) marketing in driving brand awareness and capturing potential customers who may not yet recognize their need for air purifiers.

Joey Steger [08:24]: "People have problems they interact with in their everyday life and they don't have an identified solution... When they do decide to make a decision, your brand is top of mind."

Using the analogy of Nike, Joey illustrates how consistent ToFu investments keep a brand at the forefront of consumers' minds, ensuring that when they're ready to purchase, the brand is their first choice.

Creative Strategy: Balancing Aesthetics and Functionality

Effective creative content is paramount in distinguishing Alen from competitors. Initially relying on stock imagery, the team transitioned to producing custom content that taps into the emotional aspects of their brand.

Joey Steger [12:04]: "We embarked on a branding campaign that really sought to tap into the altruistic emotions that we wanted people to have when experiencing our product."

This led to the creation of the "Utopia" campaign, which focuses on providing control, confidence, and security through Alen's products. By planning extensive two-day productions twice a year, Joey ensures a steady stream of high-quality video and photo content tailored to various customer segments and marketing channels.

Joey Steger [15:00]: "By shooting video and photography simultaneously with a comprehensive shot list, we efficiently produce content that serves multiple channels for up to six months."

Data Capture and Retention: Building a Robust Audience

Capturing first-party data is integral to Alen's marketing strategy. Joey discusses the implementation of multi-step pop-ups and the use of Segment Ninja to gather and enrich prospect information.

Joey Steger [17:38]: "Having the Prism data associated with each of the prospects really helps us tailor the type of content both visually and from a copy standpoint that speaks to these audiences."

This approach allows Alen to segment their audience based on specific concerns—such as allergies, pets, or environmental issues—and deliver highly tailored email content that boasts impressive open rates of 50-60%.

Tools and Technology: Enhancing Marketing Efficiency

Joey highlights several key tools that have been instrumental in optimizing Alen's marketing efforts:

1. Triple Whale: For multi-touch attribution and data integration.
2. Digio: For creating custom pop-ups and landing pages.
3. Rebuy: For in-cart upsells and product recommendations.
4. Segment Ninja: For enriching prospect data with Prism profiles.

Joey Steger [35:02]: "The triple whale system has been phenomenal... any pixel-based multitouch attribution software is probably the first step."

These tools collectively enable Alen to streamline their marketing processes, test creative effectiveness, and make data-driven decisions that enhance ROAS across various channels.

Underrated Channel: Direct Mail

Contrary to the digital-heavy focus, Joey identifies direct mail as an underrated yet highly effective channel. Modern direct mail leverages pixel-based data to deliver highly targeted and responsive campaigns.

Joey Steger [38:51]: "Direct mail is super responsive... I've seen 17 plus ROAS on the newer direct mail opportunities."

Alen utilizes direct mail for timely reminders, unique offer incentives, and precise targeting, achieving remarkable ROAS and complementing their digital efforts.

Marketing Kill: The Dangers of Product-Centric Messaging

Joey passionately argues against the over-reliance on product attributes in marketing. He asserts that without a compelling brand story, brands risk becoming lost in a sea of feature-focused competitors.

Joey Steger [40:47]: "You cannot win these days with just talking about product attributes. If your brand has no story, you're not going to get very far."

He emphasizes the enduring power of storytelling in marketing, highlighting its effectiveness in building communities and connecting emotionally with consumers.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Joey Steger's insights underscore the importance of a holistic, data-driven approach to customer acquisition. By embracing campaign-centric strategies, investing in ToFu marketing, leveraging advanced tools, and prioritizing storytelling, Alen Air Purifiers has successfully navigated the complexities of modern marketing to achieve sustainable growth.

Final Quotes

Joey Steger [35:02]: "Creative level conversions take it to like another level. Now you're getting even deeper with your advertising."

Joey Steger [40:47]: "Brand stories, building communities, connecting to people's emotion and passion... have such higher value and impact in your next customer's acquisition than hitting somebody 50 times over with Facebook or Google Ads."

Connect with Joey Steger

For more insights and updates from Joey Steger, follow him on LinkedIn and Instagram, and stay tuned to Alen Air Purifiers as they continue to innovate in the air purification space.

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This summary captures the essence of Episode 305, providing a comprehensive overview of Joey Steger's strategies for effective customer acquisition in 2025. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting, the actionable insights shared in this episode offer valuable guidance for optimizing your marketing efforts.

Transcript

[Joey Steger]

Foreign.

[Daniel Murray]

Welcome to the Marketing Millennials the no BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind Marketing's Coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the.

[Joey Steger]

Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today I'm joined by Joey Steger, VP.

[Daniel Murray]

Of Marketing and E Commerce at Allen Air Purifier.

[Joey Steger]

We're breaking down a fresh way to approach customer acquisition. We talk about how to rethink your customer acquisition funnel the secrets to scaling creative effectively, the tools you need to make it all work. If you want to level up your customer acquisition game, this is the episode for you. Let's dive in. What's up Joey? Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much. Nice to see you, Daniel.

I want to get into this because you you have had an interesting journey at Allen Purifiers and I want to talk about how you implemented customer acquisition strategies, how you use funnel hacking to do so. Let's just set the stage where Alan was when you got there and what have you been implementing for the last two and a half years?

Yeah, no problem. I joined Allen about two and a half years ago. When I joined, the business was relatively stable, but the acquisition of new customers really relied on a lot of word of mouth and a couple press mentions that they had had. So the system was really organized around paid search, some SEO efforts, and then a little bit of affiliate marketing. In a previous role I had helped a supplement company rapidly expand growth through multiple acquisition channels. So after coming on board we turned on metas, Facebook and Instagram advertising. We turned on Critio for display, particularly for retargeting and some prospecting. I did a lot of work of reinforcing retention mechanisms with Klaviyo and the email system. We also added OTT and CTV capabilities and tried to really dimensionalize the funnel into new customer acquisition through top of funnel tactics, rather things that relied on previous customer touch points. In the first year I implemented a multi touch attribution software called Triple Whale. It's pixel based. It's great because it enables me to look through multiple attribution models. I can look at triple attribution that matches very close to the platform metrics for each of the channels. They have an AI version of attribution that tries to model what the individual channel's contribution is as well as first, last and linear. And so a lot of last year 2024 was spent on looking at individual platform efficiencies trying to improve ROAS, decrease CPCs and CPMs, improve creative testing and click through rates. But we're still looking at channels from a lens that's really assigning them to a specific part of the funnel. And as we looked at it more, the realization is platforms like Meta and Google, which comprise a majority of the spend within our funnel, they have campaigns that you input a lot of creative elements and, and they dynamically serve that content to customers. And they intersect people at different parts of the funnel journey, sometimes in awareness, sometimes in consideration, and they attempt to move people through the funnel by leveraging different touch points and different ad pieces. And this realization kind of made me understand that you can't really just assign a channel as a whole to a specific part of the campaign. So what we started doing late in the year and looking into this next year has been kind of turning the funnel on its head or on its side, however you wanna look at it. And really looking through the lens of campaigns and determining what type of campaigns exist in different parts of the funnel and then assigning roas metrics as well as cost per view metrics to each of those stages. And you would, you would want to see increasing roas and decreased cost per view and especially new customer cost per view through those campaigns at each of the different levels of this, of the funnel. And then I work in an environment where I don't have an entire media team in house. I actually have a network of agencies that I utilize to be able to execute. And so we had to develop communication systems for providing visibility for, for each of these partners with each other based on the adjustments that they were making within their campaigns. Because ultimately we've found that there's some optimal spend levels that exist for different parts of the funnel and the different campaigns that are affecting those parts of the funnel need to work together. If, say, my paid search team and my meta team both increase campaigns that are affecting the upper funnel, but nobody has increased spend in campaigns in the middle of the funnel. We end up pulling in a lot of prospects that don't get converted well. And our competitors will be advertising people at that middle funnel level as well, where people are considering which product or which brand they're actually going to buy. And inefficiencies in that level will reduce the overall conversion value that I can drive through the funnel. So balancing those different campaigns from one partner to another is really critical to developing efficiency. And we kind of landed on those effective spend ranges by taking a lot of our triple whale data and pushing it through ChatGPT and running queries where it helped us find these optimal spend levels. So we found that in the top of funnel we want to be anywhere from 55 to 70% of our spend and in the middle funnel we want to be anywhere from like 13 to 30% of our spend. And really keeping like 5 to 15% of our spend in our, in our bottom funnel is like the optimal range for us. So it's been, it's been really interesting to kind of develop a new way of looking at the marketing funnel through that campaign lens.

I, I want to take like a, a dumbed down step back and say like for people who don't know like when you're talking campaign like what, what what are you talking about? Because there's obviously in marketing there's like yeah, five different definitions of what a campaign could be. So what are you talking about in from a paid lens?

So from a paid lens those automatic campaigns that I was talking about would be something like Advantage plus. In the meta platform or in Google it would be like a PMAX type of campaign. Differences would be something like in Facebook you might have a CRM list that retargets and that's a non automated campaign that's usually using a specific CRM list. And in Google you might have a brand campaign that uses all of your brand terms and so those are more limited where the demand is really driven by other inputs. Those automated campaigns are the ones that are constantly trying to find, find new customers for you within their own ecosystems.

Could you explain why you think that like that top of funnels is so important for marketing? Because I think a lot of people get caught, caught on like capturing that existing people who are like looking for air purifiers or like for example there's so many people who just aren't educated on like air purifiers themselves and why they should have them in the home. Really everybody should have an air purifier if you in your house. But how do, why is that top of funnel so important? Why is it that 70% of your marketing spend is going towards that?

Great question. I think it's two parts. One is people have problems they interact with in their everyday life and they don't have an identified solution. Or maybe they have an identified solution and it's not working great for them. The fitness industry is like a perfect example of this, right? Like, like why would you market a new supplement? Well, somebody's working out and they're not getting the results that they want. Air purification is the same thing, people think that their allergy medication is working or they think that the scent device that they have in their kitchen is working for them, but they realize, oh, there's some, some other options out there for me. Oh, I can reduce the chance that I'm gonna get sick by purifying the air. Oh, there's all kinds of stuff in the air that I didn't realize is actually hazardous to me. The EPA did a study that indoor air is up to five times worse than outdoor air. And so when they become aware of this, then they start to consider, oh, an air purifier could be the solution for me. So it's really drawing in people who their lifestyle or their life goals match the solutions that an air purifier provides, but they're not aware of it yet. The other factor is there's probably people who have told them about an air purifier, but they aren't quite, they haven't quite decided whether it's something they want to make a commitment to. And you want to make sure your brand is visible so that when they do decide to make a decision, your brand is top of mind. Even Nike does this. Nike, 90% of their advertising spend and marketing spend is really around driving awareness and they're just waiting for that 10% of time that people are ready to buy. Yeah, I, I buy Nike, but I don't buy it every single month. But I'm engaging with their advertising and marketing every single month so that when I do and when I am ready to buy a shoe, they're a top of mind brand. So making sure that you have an appropriate amount of top of funnel spend does a lot for helping your lower channels convert. Your paid search is going to rely on people searching your name or your topic. There's only a certain amount of those searches that happen every month and there's a certain number of competitors that are in the mix. So by you investing in top of funnel and targeting towards people whose lifestyle is likely to align with your product gives you a much better chance of pulling in customers where you're the first brand they've interacted and you're top of mind when it comes time to purchase.

That was a great way to put it. I think a lot of things you're talking about, I mean you have a lot of channels going on. So you have like connected tv, you have meta Google, you have, you, you have tons of marketing going on. But what's really going to separate is, is this great copy, great creative, am I putting the right thing in front of the right customer. So how are you leveraging like and speeding up your creative to be able to match the needs of all these channels?

Yeah, great question. A problem for many of us, especially in this high content consumption lifestyle that we exist in. Admittedly when I first came on board and even when we started turning on these channels, we used a lot of stock imagery and put our product into it. So anybody who, who tells you you have to have custom built creative that's exactly for your brand right off the bat, I wouldn't subscribe to that. I think you can start getting into it and produce content at scale even if you have to use stock photography. As we evolved, we recognized that using stock photography is a band aid fix for a period of time. But to really improve the metrics around click through rate and engagement with the brand, you do have to differentiate yourself from the competition and you have to get out of the arms race of product attributes as the only definition of how you separate yourself from the competition. And so we, we embarked on a branding campaign that really sought to tap into the altruistic emotions that we wanted people to have when experiencing our product. So we came out with a campaign called Utopia. And the idea is really around giving you control and confidence and security in your environment with our product. And a lot of our competitors were talking about we make the air really pure. Pure air is a great experience. We eliminate 99.9% of harmful containers, contaminants, and we make sure we have those base metrics in there to ensure people that from a wellness standpoint we're meeting those needs. But we're actually trying to speak to the emotion of the end state that you desire when you experience the brand. So once we solidified that and came out with that brand campaign, we did invest in creative to be able to supply it. The way that we do it efficiently is that we think through a longer term lens. We probably only do two productions a year and they're two day productions. And we think through a variety of customers that we have or potential customers that we're targeting. We think through their lifestyle, where they live, what they do, who they interact with. And we specifically design our production to be both video and photo at the same time. We know we use a lot more photo than video, but we shoot our OTT and video segments in three to seven minute segments and then we spend a bunch of time photographing during the video shoot. And then after the video shoot, we'll reposition elements and stage a variety of shots that we need and we build a really extensive shot list to be able to get there by going to each of the channels and asking them what are the types of images that you need to be successful. And that's provided a lot of insights for us. Like in video, you want to see a happy family and you want to see the air purifier within the shot. A lot of times that puts the air purifier in a place that you wouldn't naturally have it in your house. It's kind of closer to people, it's a little bit more in frame. And if you were going to put photography like that on the site, people who are spending more time looking at it would go, well, that's not really how I'm going to put it into my house. So after shooting the video, we'll rearrange some of the furniture, put the air purifier where it's more likely to be in someone's home and then we'll shoot a bunch of stills with that for the website. And so kind of this understanding of where the ad is going to be placed and what that stuff, story and scene needs to look like as well as the photography, where it's going to be placed and how it needs to look like that leads us to a pretty extensive shot list. But then we can be really efficient in two days of production to get everything we need for easily six months across all these channels.

That's cool. I mean, at least you're not doing what a lot of marketing teams are doing where it's having a campaign come up and they have to rapidly go and do get a shot list up, make sure it's done and then they're scrambling. You have at least I would say 90%, 95% of things you need and if you need something rapidly, you could probably do it, but.

Or we also have like a network of content creators. So if we had to do something unique that we just have no content for and we need to do it in a short period of time, having a group of people that we've worked with before who have our products, know our brand well, being able to go to them to help us produce something in a shorter period of time is. Is a cost effective way to be able to do it.

I mean, also one of the benefits of doing Top of Funnel is, and especially in E Com is that you have capture forms on your site and you're building an owned audience. So could you talk a little bit of how important like capturing that first party data is and how using that with Your retention strategies or your lifecycle strategies?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great point. That's another great benefit to the Triple Whale platform is that it does track email signups by channel. So we can see how effective different channels are at bringing customers in. We also use a multi step pop up on the site. And so we're trying to pretty immediately gather, you know, what are the, what's the concern that you're really here for? So that we have a segmented prospect journey that relates to that concern. Some people come for allergies and dust, other people are coming because of their pets or maybe they're coming because of mold or an environmental issue. And so we have a variety of prospect flows that enable us to segment out what somebody's main concern is. We also use a really cool tool that's pretty new, I'm really excited about it. This guy started a company called Segment Ninja and if you're familiar with Prism profiles, it'll take our prospect email list and it'll plug it into a database and in Klaviyo it'll assign the Prism profile associated to that email address. So it'll give us broad characteristics like does this person have a family, is their household income within a certain range, are they tech oriented person or we have a fair number of customers who are empty nesters and retirees, people who have identified health conditions. And so having this Prism data associated with each of the prospects really helps us tailor the type of content both visually and from a copy standpoint that speaks to these audiences. And we experience, you know, 50 plus 60 plus open rates on our emails, whether they're flows or campaigns because the messaging is just really well tailored to that individual.

That's super cool. I think, I mean that, I mean that's the benefit of capturing the data too because you, you can't do that with Meta and Google. You could put in what you think like your customers care about, but actually sometimes it could be completely opposite or a segment that you didn't think about that you could now target because you, you're capturing that 100%.

Like before doing multi step pop ups and utilizing Segment Ninja, our message was very broad, our imagery was really agnostic and it was, it was effective but it's gotten a lot more effective as we've been able to segment and especially just what campaigns people come in from. So people who come from very high top of funnel campaigns, there's more information that we give them in that content versus somebody who signs up via a mid or a lower funnel campaign, they're so much closer to the decision process. We, we're giving them things like how do we compare to other air purifiers? What have customers said about us? What type of third party validation certificates do we have? Whereas somebody who's coming through a top of funnel campaign, we're giving them more of the basics about. Here's what you need to know about air purification. Here's some of the terms that you're gonna see associated with our products and competitor products and how you need to think about them. So that campaign specific route to email sign up is also really valuable to tailor the message.

That's one thing the hidden benefit of top of Funnel is it's like one of the best message testing because if you just rely on the bottom of funnel, middle funnel, you're getting people who already know you or have heard about you. So you really getting a lot of the same people who have the same interest talking to each other about this problem where like topic you can get, let's say someone with allergies here, a parent with a child with allergies here, or someone who lives in an area where there's high allergens. And you might have not thought about that. Like you live, I know you live in Austin. Austin is like the allergy capital of the United States. So it's wild. So like having an air purifier is pretty much for like especially with cedar fever and stuff like that. You need an ear purifier. But no, if you don't know about that, you wouldn't talk about that in your marketing.

Yeah, absolutely, that, that helps a ton. I also think a lot of times marketers or brands in general are a little afraid of top of funnel because they feel like there's a lack of targeting or it's more difficult to determine metrics. Like I've heard brands or other marketers are weary about doing OTT and ctv and I think some of them might still think that it operates like linear television does. But a lot of OTT and CTV actually enable us to target people based on zip codes and household incomes and things like that. So there's a lot of information that can guide where you're going to show up or what channels you're going to show up on. But really strong OTT and CTV platforms also have great display retargeting aspects because they can utilize IP address as well. And those display retargeting provides click point data that's associated with the view data from the OTT ctv. So you can actually start to Build a bit of an understanding. If you recognize your clickbait data as a percentage of the overall exposure, that can give you a lot more confidence. I mean we're up to seeing about almost like a 3 roas on our OTT CTV and I think a lot of times marketers, they think oh I'd be lucky to break even on doing a channel like that.

Yeah. And I mean OTT the like the Netflix of the world of Hulu's and stuff like that are collecting so much interest based data that you can utilize where like traditional television was, is just so broad where that this at least you can get in the nitty gritty of like hey, this person cares about this or cares about that and they live in this type of household or this type of household. So yeah, the targeting is, is, is way better. I mean it's kind of hard in the sense of like you have to get pretty good a good creative on those platforms. Once you have a good creative you can like use it all. I want to go back into.

Yeah.

The philosophy that you've the mindset. I mean could you explain a little bit more about how you kind of are doing this campaign based marketing and versus what you were doing before and how it's worked and how it's helped your marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I would say looking through the Google lens is probably like the easiest way because we previously looked at it as a mid and lower funnel only channel and and we would use a blended roas across all the campaigns and we would hold that channel manager to say a 4 roas at the end of the year. But as we started to look into the different campaign segments, we realized how differently they play within that customer's journey. The PMAX new campaign was really working as an upper funnel tactic. It could rarely get above a 2 and a half or 3 and a half ROAS. But the brand core campaign that was chock full of our brand terms was seeing like a 26 or 28 ROAS. And so this would result in inefficiencies of spend into some of those middle and upper funnel channels that were trying so hard to convert somebody and then it would just be balanced out by a really high roas from one particular brand campaign. And so when we started to realize this, we took a look at that PMAX new customers as really a top of funnel campaign. The PMAX existing campaign, because people had already visited the site was really acting more as a mid funnel tactic. And then we have a campaign called Brand plus which we isolate our core branded terms, any that use our brand name like Alan in our brand Core campaign, we have a brand plus campaign that uses loosely associated terms with our brand. Like some of the model numbers would be an example of a loosely associated term. And that is really working at mid funnel too, because somebody received either a friend said to them, oh, I have this model, or they saw in Rolling Stones list of best air purifiers that this model was a great one. And so we know they're kind of mid consideration. And so when we started to separate them out and put different ROAS requirements on each of those channels, we saw a shift in the spending. And that shift in spending better correlated with the funnel percentages that we knew were efficient for us as a system. And so that's when it really kind of got the wheels rolling. Hey, we need to look at all the channels like this because they're all operating differently. Even our affiliate channel, um, when we work with like Better Homes and Gardens or Forbes or Rolling Stone, those are very upper funnel engagements. People are coming across that article in the magazine or they get an email from that publication and it's one of the first times that they're hearing about air purifiers. But then we have other affiliate partners like Rakuten, which is basically giving people cash back for the purchase and those have plugins on the site. That's really happening at the moment of consumer conversion. It's not really a discovery platform for it. But all of these were being lumped together in terms of the affiliate channels, roas Target. So being able to separate those out enables our affiliate channel to actually find more partners at the top of Funnel and pursue more of those engagements, which serve as a bit of a PR mechanism for drawing new people into the brand. Even though it's a CPA model.

I mean, that's the problem with only looking at blended. And if you're not looking at a campaign level, because if you look at blended, blended should just be looked at as a way to say, hey, overall marketing is efficient, but it doesn't look at hey, like Google. Like, if you don't do Google correctly, it hides a lot of like, like you said those branded campaigns where like people are searching. Allan. But like, for example, if you, what you're talking about is if you do like a PMAX campaign on Google and then you do like a prospecting campaign on Meta and you're doing like all these different ones that are top of Funnel, you can like now batch in all those as like a way to say, hey, like, these are what the creators we're using the like for targeting like people who don't know about us. The middle, these are the creatives we're using in the types of campaigns in each platform we're using for people who might know about us and then here like people who definitely know about us here like, like what we're using and then now you can like batch us out. It's super smart way of looking at it versus like a lot of people would just say like oh, Google's having a 5 row as but like it's because that the 28 ROAs of the branded search campaigns that you.

Yeah, and I think a lot of brands like, I mean I've been a part of startups before as they've grown and scaled and I think it's, it just, it kind of naturally occurs. Right. If you're just getting into paid media and you start with something like Google, it's, you see a good return for it and you recognize hey, these people are already looking for this topic. So I'm capitalizing on their active consideration and driving them towards my brand for a conversion. So that starts working for you, you're starting to grow, you see some good return for it and then you're like hey, we should turn on another channel. And then they're trying to like figure out how does incrementality work as I turn on that new channel or if I'm going to invest in that, how do I know that it's worth the investment instead of putting more money into Google? And so a lot of times what they'll do is they'll say okay, well that new channel has to either match or beat the roas for Google. And then they just kind of keep adding channels and they're holding them to whatever that historic roas is. And it, and it gets them very much into a pattern of thinking as a whole channel has to deliver roas. But if you start to say hey, how are we actually attracting customers? Like what's the journey? I think one of the things that really helped us unlock this idea of campaign versus channel was our post purchase survey as we started to ask more detailed questions in that about where people first heard about a product if they had touched any other parts of the funnel. That gave us a lot of insight as to the overlap and the multiple touch points that exist in that customer's journey. And then that's what really spawned this look that says hey, within these channels different campaigns work differently. And if we just start to think about it as a whole customer Experience, it kind of jumps off the page at you that hey, these different campaigns do different things.

I come from like a B2B marketing world. So like at least like in the B2B marketing world it's easier to do this because you have like dedicated metrics that are easier to look at. Like cost per lead is like the more of a top of funnel. Like and then you can also look at like net new versus like leads we already have in our CRM versus. And then you have cost per opportunity and then you have like customer acquiring the customer and then you can plug different people and different parts of the funnel into it where E Comm. It's a little harder to do that because there's not really like besides like a website capture, there's not like a sales rep talking to that person. So you kind of like limbo stage of like how do we get these people back?

Yeah. And that's where we look at over order overlap, like the different channels. We want to make sure that any particular channel isn't having more than like a 50% overlap or else we know that they're working too hard at too many parts of the funnel. And that cost per view metric is also one that helps us think about and kind of control how much it's actually costing if this happens to be somebody that we've already engaged with before. That collective cost per view, taking into account average touch points for customers helps us kind of control that CPA lens, if you will.

And also, I mean what you're doing too is at least like for Google or whatever. Since we've been talking about Google, at least you can now like hold different stages of the funnel to the correct row as it should be for the branded maybe 20 ROAs. And above the middle, like middle it's probably a four or five ROAs. And then the, the top is probably a one or one and a half if you're, if you're doing it well and then you can blend it at the end. But at least you're holding the people doing the work to a standard of hey and. And then it doesn't also screw the people who are doing meta and ct, CTV and OTT because they have it's different metrics for every single channel that works. So it makes sense why you're doing the way you're doing it. And I think it's super smart.

Yeah, I think there was some initial hesitation with our Google team about imposing those higher roas and they were like, oh, I don't know if that's going to work. But in doing so, they let those campaigns do what they're supposed to do more efficiently. And because we knew the percentage of total spend that needed to exist in the upper funnel, within a month or two, Meta had doubled their spend at an efficient roas. And you could see the flow through in those mid and lower campaigns for Google. And so that's when they started to believe, oh, okay, this does work. We're seeing a lot more through there than we did before because they had campaigns that were just trying to reach people too many times in places that weren't ready to buy. I mean, at the end of the day, as good as Google is a Facebook video, introducing somebody to a brand and telling them how it's different than a competitor brand is much more effective than anything that you see in the search system.

What is some like a recommendation? You have a marketer who's trying to get more efficient with their paid advertising.

I would say the triple whale system has been phenomenal to me and there's several others like it out there. But any pixel based multitouch attribution software is probably the first step. When you're just looking at platform metrics alone, it is really hard because every platform wants to claim credit for every single site sale. And only when you can start to look at them all together are you able to really start to parse them out. Like even when we look at top of funnel campaigns, we look at those through a first click attribution lens. Because I want to know how effective were those in the top of funnel as being a person's first click? And at the bottom of the funnel I want to look at those through a last click attribution model. How, how effective were they at converting somebody at the end of the journey? You'll never get that with platform metrics. You need that type of software to be able to help you do it. I think it's like $2,000 a month, which is nominal for the, the data that you get, you will easily cover that cost in that investment. So for me it's really about the right software to look at the data in the right way.

I mean all these software's number one goal is to get you to spend more and they make it hard for you to share data. So having a platform that you can see all those walled off softwares in one place is like a gold mine. And having something like a creative testing thing like motion or something like that, where you can see at a creative level. Yeah, creative level. Like these are the ones that are converting versus these those creators. Converting takes it to like another level. Now you're getting even deeper with your advertising. So.

And even the triple wheel platform has a new feature that they released this year called Sonar and so it feeds that information back into the Meta platform. So we have Meta's Pixel on our site, but we also have the triple Whale Pixel. The Triple Whale Pixel is connected to Shopify so it's able to see our customer database. So it's feeding even more information back to the Facebook Pixel when we turn that feature on. I saw an instant like 15% improvement in performance on Facebook alone because it was getting richer data back because of the leveraging Shopify into the Meta system. So I mean that, that alone could, could easily pay for the software.

I mean I was going to ask you like what are what are like the top three or top four tools in your stack right now that are helping you? So I could really guess one and one of them.

Yeah, yeah, that one is really powerful. We're also using Digio. It's a great tool for our pop ups but it also makes custom landing pages really easy to build. Rebuy is another one that we're using. It's great for in cart up sales product recommendations. It's a pretty slick product too. Oh sorry. Digio also enables us to do an on site quiz. So if you have a product where people need to figure out which one is right for them, quizzes are phenomenal. Especially if they're less than five or seven questions. Yeah, I mean we use a host of other stuff but I'd say those are kind of the big ones for us.

And what's the most underrated channel you're looking at right now? What are some people are way looking over?

For me it might not be the same for everybody, but direct mail has a surprising number of new facets to it. I think the old world of direct mail was pick some zip codes that you think your customers are in and let's send them a postcard as a call it upper funnel tactic to try and grab new customers. Nowadays direct mail is super responsive. It can relate to pixel based data of people coming to your site. And it can time reminders or unique offer incentives. It can check it against your customer list and only target new customers. And the cost per print and send is extremely low. I've seen 17 plus ROAS on the newer direct mail opportunities. I've gotten direct mail from clothing companies, supplement companies really well times seven today. Seven, seven to ten days after visiting the site. Great unique Offer very easy to be able to measure the incrementality of investment in that channel and good agencies that provide this service. It's pretty set it and forget it. From a content standpoint, you only need to populate new content like once a quarter and you can provide really unique offers. The data behind it is really strong. So I think a lot of people are like quick to dismiss direct mail, but I, I think it's still pretty powerful.

I, I think that is a great underrated channel to talk about. I think it is. I mean in all industries it's, it's when people are not using something, it's. You go to that channel and test it, at least put some budget towards it. It doesn't mean you have to put all your budget, but yeah, it's a good, good. Lastly, was what is a marketing kill?

You would die on a marketing hill. I would die on stories like you cannot win these days with just talking about product attribute. If your brand has no story, you're not going to get very far. You just aren't. You're going to be victim to one. Upping on specs or features and product development is a slow process. Brand stories, building communities, connecting to people's emotion and passion that goes so much further. The personal stories that people tell each other in a world where we're marketed to 80% of the day have such higher value and impact in your next customer's acquisition than hitting somebody 50 times over with Facebook or Google Ad.

I love it. I mean also, we've been telling stories for three thousands of years and that's what's been passed down. It's. I don't think people are passing down the best tool that they use the 3,000 years ago.

So yeah, great point.

Lastly, where could people find you, what you're doing, all that good stuff?

Yeah, Obviously I'm on LinkedIn. I have an Instagram account, but it's mostly me and my family. But yeah, working at Allen, just excited about helping this brand grow. I think we make the best air purifiers out there. I'm trying to make a product that is exciting, engaging. You know, I think anytime somebody is able to take a product that everybody thinks is sleepy and gone, they think of air purifiers as a black or gray trash can in the corner of their room and you can make it look cool and stylish and make it a part of your wellness routine. I feel like that's a big win. So I'm excited about continuing to do that.

[Daniel Murray]

I'm actually so surprised.

[Joey Steger]

And, I mean, I'm not actually surprised because Ari's like, this is like, like adding something to the room that's helpful might not be added to the room just because it's not aesthetically pleasing. It's just so funny. It's just, yeah, like, I want to add this, like, thing into my room and she'll only use it if it's, like, needed for, like, that number of days, and she will put it away until, like, she's not needed anymore. So it's, it's really funny. I think that's so true that people, you need that esthetically pleasing thing in your room, otherwise some people are going to not want that in their room. So.

Yeah. It's amazing how many products have rejuvenated stale markets just through esthetics, right?

Yeah, it's smart. I mean, a lot. I mean, taking stale, I mean, just even like product packaging or product.

Yep.

It just changes changes the game, makes it more fun. But yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. And great chat.

You too. Thank you for having me, Daniel. Have a good one.

[Daniel Murray]

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.