Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital)

May 7, 2023 1h 34m 28 insights Episode Page ↗
Jonathan Becker, an OG in performance marketing and founder of Thrive Digital, discusses paid growth. He covers privacy shifts, the importance of creatives, attribution challenges, hiring strategies, and AI's impact on the industry.
Actionable Insights

1. Capitalize on Opportunities

Be willing to take calculated risks and “shoot your shot” when opportunities arise, as luck often requires you to capitalize on situations you’ve put yourself in.

2. Diversify Marketing Channels

Avoid over-reliance on a single performance marketing channel; instead, diversify your marketing mix across various channels (e.g., email, direct mail, SEO, paid) to mitigate volatility and risk.

3. Prioritize Profitability in Paid Growth

Focus on the profitability of customer acquisition, understanding how much you can afford to spend per customer before it becomes unprofitable, rather than solely pursuing breakneck growth.

4. Attribution: Ongoing Investigation

Approach attribution as an ongoing investigation, continuously looking for evidence to validate campaign outcomes, rather than seeking a single, definitive source of truth, as none exists.

5. Rigorous Creative Testing Process

Establish a rigorous process for testing and iterating creative assets to systematically determine what works, rather than relying on anecdotal findings or individual brilliance.

6. Focus on Strategic Work

Shift human capital to strategic tasks like modeling, validation, asking the right questions, and creative levers, as AI displaces manual implementation and bid modification.

7. Leverage AI for Creative Mockups

Use AI tools like DALL-E or Midjourney to generate creative mockups significantly faster, but ensure you understand how to ask the right questions and iterate effectively.

8. In-House Expertise, Then Agency

If you’re focusing on performance marketing, start by building in-house expertise, and then consider hiring an agency to scale faster, gain more resources, and access specialized capabilities.

9. Hire Technical Performance Marketers

For your first performance marketing hire, prioritize candidates with a strong technical background and ingenuity to solve problems related to tracking, attribution, data visualization, and campaign management.

10. Experienced Performance Marketer Hire

Look for candidates with direct experience managing various ad channels (Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon) and a deep appreciation for the role of creative, proper attribution, and understanding your business mechanics.

11. Assess Composure & Problem-Solving

In interviews, ask unexpected logic questions (e.g., “How many windows in NYC?”) to assess a candidate’s ability to think on their feet, break down problems, and maintain composure under pressure, especially for client-facing roles.

12. Cultivate Adaptability Culture

Foster a company culture that welcomes change and new technologies, encouraging a playful mindset with new tools rather than resisting shifts in the industry.

13. Advise Clients Bravely

In client interactions, be brave enough to tell clients what you believe they truly need, even if it differs from their initial requests, to avoid inadvertently leading them down the wrong path.

14. Integrate Classic Marketing

Don’t solely focus on performance marketing; remember to leverage classic and offline marketing methods like direct mail, email marketing, and SEO, as they can work beautifully.

15. Exercise Patience in Paid Growth

Do not expect overnight turnarounds in performance marketing; understand that every business is unique and requires patience to work out what works for its specific metrics and nuances.

16. Validate Paid Acquisition Potential

If your business successfully leverages other marketing channels (e.g., social media, email, organic search, direct mail), it’s highly likely that paid acquisition will also be effective.

Don’t view SEO and paid search as mutually exclusive; it’s a great idea to invest in both to diversify channels and create a robust marketing mix.

18. Iterate Creatives Based on Data

Avoid using a single homogenous message across all targeting; instead, dedicate resources to paid marketing and continually iterate creative assets based on performance data from ad sets and campaigns.

19. Scientific Creative Testing

Experiment with creative assets by isolating single variables, maintaining similar targeting conditions, and determining which ad styles perform best for specific audiences at different funnel stages.

20. Structured A/B Testing for Ads

For ad creative testing (e.g., on Meta), create an ad set with a single audience and two nearly identical creatives, varying only one variable (e.g., copy or image) to isolate impact and gather learnings for iteration.

21. Prioritize User-Generated Content

Use unpolished, authentic user-generated content (e.g., iPhone videos with influencers) as it often massively outperforms highly produced ads due to its perceived authenticity.

22. Test Playful Creative Elements

Experiment with unexpected and playful elements in your creatives, such as including pets in product photos, as this can dramatically increase engagement and performance on paid social channels.

23. Use In-Platform Testing Tools

Leverage the sophisticated creative testing tools available directly within ad platforms like Meta Ads and Google Ads, as exotic third-party tools are not always necessary for effective testing.

24. E-commerce: Investigate TikTok Ads

If you are an e-commerce, wholesale, retail, or direct-to-consumer brand, you must investigate TikTok advertising due to its massive, highly engaged audience and exciting opportunities.

25. TikTok: Founder/Influencer Content

On TikTok, founder-led brands creating authentic, handheld iPhone videos, or companies adept at partnering with influencers, tend to achieve significant success due to highly engaging content.

26. High Creative Output for TikTok

Be prepared for the high creative asset demands of TikTok advertising, as it requires launching net new assets several times per week, which necessitates significant creative resourcing and investment.

27. Lead Scoring for High-Value Customers

For lead generation, use data connectors like Supermetrics to pipe CRM revenue data into a database, join it with channel data, and build a lead scoring model to bid on audiences with a higher likelihood of converting to high-revenue customers.

28. Multi-Faceted Attribution Methods

Beyond cookie-based attribution, incorporate statistical modeling (like Media Mix Modeling), customer surveys, and population surveys to gain a comprehensive understanding of campaign impact. Consider tools like Recast for this.