RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Rachael Shayne

In 2024, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) remains a crucial strategy for B2B companies looking to engage with high-value clients. By leveraging detailed psychographic data, ABM enables marketers to deliver highly personalized experiences that cut through the noise of the nearly 10,000 ad messages we see every day. However, most marketing teams are lean, and so are their budgets. Implementing ABM isn’t simple, but it’s doable with a lean team and lean budget, especially by adding in a dose of AI. Here are some practical strategies and insights you can swipe to execute effective ABM without a large team or substantial martech budget.

Understanding ABM

ABM identifies and targets key accounts with personalized marketing strategies. Simple. You’re creating more relevance versus relying on one way to sell to many different people. Said another way, your target/s should feel “seen” versus “targeted.”

Core principles include narrowing your focus to high-value accounts, customized messaging, and (crucially) sales and marketing alignment.

Benefits of ABM:

Common Misconceptions:

Essential Elements of a Successful ABM Strategy

Identifying High-Value Target Accounts: Focus on quality over quantity. Select accounts that align with your business objectives and show high revenue potential. Go back through your history of deals, looking at total revenue over a specific period. In a growth-stage company, this often means sitting down with the CEO and the original head of sales and extracting deal-flow information. Who are your best accounts, and why? How and when did they buy? Catalog the information. This gives you clues to find look-alikes. Determine the 5-7 things that made your best customers pop to the top. Timing/Seasonality? Public or Private? Size of Company? Type of Investors and/or Board pressure? Market Dynamics? AI can help you find the patterns, but you need to build out the base of knowledge – for yourself and the company – before you plumb for insights. If you just brought on Hubspot or similar, get the data logged.

Developing Personalized Plans including Content and Messaging: Now, thinking about the high-value accounts and the types of people/roles you’re targeting at those accounts – how can you reach them in multiple ways that feel sticky and actionable? Don’t immediately just run targeted ads and email campaigns. I have tapped into billboards, old school direct mail, event intercepts, Board of Directors “top to top” outreach via CxOs, LinkedIn content plus email and targeted ads. Be interesting and be seen. That’s the real nature of ABM.

Now, create content that speaks directly to your target accounts’ needs and pain points that align with your brand’s personality. Here’s an example: when building the Project Canary brand and continuous emissions monitoring market, we ran billboards near key locations that said, “Give Emissions the Bird.” – edgy, memorable, nailed the sentiment. The entire campaign zigged while the rest of the market was still zagging. Your target needs to see actionable, concise, and memorable messaging many, many times before they will engage.

Leverage AI-driven content platforms like Phrasee or Persado to create personalized messages that resonate with your target accounts. These tools analyze language patterns and customer behavior to generate content that speaks directly to your prospect’s pain points and needs.

This simple form of personalization applied to 1:1 and 1:many emails results in a double-digit increase in open rates and click-throughs.  

Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams: It’s essential to gain the trust of your sales leaders, working alongside them to show them how to use the tools and demonstrate that you’re a commercially oriented marketer. Regular communication and joint planning are crucial to success.

Measuring Success and Iterating Strategies: Track key performance metrics and be ready to adjust strategies based on data insights and market changes. Continuous improvement is crucial. ABM is not “set it and forget it.” It’s a high-touch strategy.  

Implementing ABM with Limited Resources

 No matter which tools you rely on, I have learned one key thing about making AI work hard for you: the prompt matters. Bad prompts get you bad results. It’s not the AI; it’s you.

Here’s a “bad” prompt for help determining personas for your ABM campaign:

Bad Prompt: Find out what people care about the most so I can write them a good sales email.

Great Prompt: You specialize in assisting the sales team to prepare for calls with clients or prospects by providing persona-based research on . When I provide the job title and industry, you will conduct online research to compile persona-based information. This includes information such as job responsibilities, core metrics their role is measured by, pain points, motivations, priorities, and challenges.
##
Rule #1: ALWAYS provide your answer in this format:
“Overview
Job Title:
Industry:
Job Responsibilities:
Key partners in their business:
Core metrics:
Pain Points:
Motivations:
Priorities:
Challenges:”

Rule #2: ALWAYS ask the user for the job title and industry before conducting your research.

Rule #3: Think step by step.

Other good AI assistants:

AI for Data Analysis and Insights. AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends, helping to refine target account lists and engagement strategies.

Predictive Analytics for Targeted Account Selection. Use predictive analytics to forecast which accounts will most likely convert, allowing for more strategic resource allocation.

AI for Personalized Content Creation. AI-powered tools can generate personalized content at scale, ensuring each target account receives relevant and engaging material.

Practical Tips and Actionable Steps

Step-by-Step Guide:

  1. Identify and prioritize high-value target accounts.
  2. Develop personalized content that is memorable and actionable
  3. Align sales and marketing efforts.
  4. Leverage existing tools and integrate AI for data analysis and content creation.
  5. Continuously measure performance and iterate strategies.

Recommendations for Integrating AI Tools: Start small with AI tools that offer trial versions or low-cost options. Gradually integrate more advanced tools as you scale your ABM efforts. Become a prompt engineer. Seriously.

Continuous Improvement: Regularly review your ABM strategy and adjust based on performance data and market changes.

ABM is a powerful strategy for B2B marketing, even for small teams with limited budgets. Businesses can implement effective ABM campaigns by leveraging AI and focusing on strategic planning. Start small, iterate, and scale as you gain insights and resources.

We’d love for you to share your experiences and questions with us. And for further support, you can engage with our team of experts to implement some of these strategies in your own company.

About the Author
Rachael Shayne is an Executive Marketing Leader with expertise in climate technology, sustainability, and consumer goods. She is known for driving revenue-focused marketing strategies and building brands for growth-stage companies. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachaelsd

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Cindy Berman

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence has transitioned from a novel idea to a crucial growth strategy in fast-paced B2B marketing. Drawing from my experiences with startups like Productboard, Segment, Grammarly, and Vowel, I’ve seen firsthand how AI can revolutionize product marketing. This article delves into how B2B marketing teams can and should use AI better today, specifically in product marketing throughout the product lifecycle.

Before diving into how these tools can enhance your marketing efforts, it’s essential to have a sound marketing strategy in place. AI tools are powerful, but they cannot replace a well-thought-out strategy. Here are a few critical components you need to establish first:

You can’t just go in blank and expect these AI solutions to do all the work. You need to have your marketing strategy first and then use tools to supplement it or scale your efforts. Don’t accept anything blindly; proofread, revise, review, and look at the data.

My Favorite AI Solutions to Product Marketing Challenges

1. Runic: Enhancing Marketing Intelligence

Problem: Traditional marketing platforms often provide generic insights, even with ChatGPT integrations. These insights aren’t actionable for teams, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. This lack of actionable insights means marketing teams struggle to make data-driven decisions, impacting the effectiveness of their campaigns and overall strategy. Consequently, companies cannot fully understand their market position and customer preferences, leading to suboptimal marketing performance.

Solution: Runic offers advanced marketing intelligence that empowers teams with data-driven insights. By utilizing AI to analyze market trends, customer behavior, and competitive landscapes, Runic provides actionable intelligence that can shape product marketing strategies. This enables marketing teams to make informed decisions that enhance campaign effectiveness and drive growth. By offering deep insights into customer and market behavior, Runic helps companies stay ahead of the competition and meet their customers’ needs more effectively.

My Experience: Combining external and internal data is a game-changer, but actually having real recommendations on what content to create and which product improvements to focus on really helps drive marketing excellence. With Runic, I can now create content and strategies directly informed by comprehensive data, making my efforts more effective and impactful.

Example Use Case: A large SaaS company uses Runic to evaluate its partnerships. They want to see which partners have the best reputation among developers and watch how that’s changing week after week. This will help inform the product marketing team about how to message around partnerships—which to avoid and which to promote. They’re using public data right now, but they could easily integrate support tickets and check which partners appear problematic. Runic automatically recommends strategies based on their goals and existing partnerships.

Caution: Ensure you have a robust data infrastructure and clear objectives before integrating Runic. The tool is most effective when it can access comprehensive and relevant data to analyze.

2. Enterpret: Gaining Customer Feedback for Product Decisions

Problem: Many products fail to meet customer expectations because decisions are made without adequate customer feedback. Studies show that 69% of products are not well-received due to this disconnect. This gap in understanding customer needs leads to developing features and products that do not align with user expectations, resulting in high churn rates and wasted resources. Without a systematic approach to gathering and analyzing customer feedback, businesses risk alienating their customer base and missing out on crucial opportunities for improvement.

Solution: Enterpret is an AI-driven platform that aggregates and analyzes customer feedback to inform product decisions and ensure products align with customer needs. By continuously collecting and interpreting feedback, Enterpret helps companies understand and align with their customer’s preferences and pain points. This proactive approach enables businesses to make data-driven product decisions that enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, by identifying trends and common feedback themes, Enterpret helps companies prioritize their development efforts on features that will have the most significant impact.

My Experience: Understanding what customers wanted previously took me hours, combining and analyzing endless sheets and emails from hundreds of sales and customer success individuals. With Enterpret, I can see clear and actionable customer feedback, efficiently guiding features for the product roadmap. This has saved me time and significantly improved how the products I market align with customer expectations.

Example Use Case: Apollo, a leading sales engagement platform, uses Enterpret to gather and analyze customer feedback across various channels. This feedback informs product development and marketing strategies, helping Apollo better understand and address user pain points. This data-driven approach has resulted in improved user satisfaction and increased revenue.

Caution: Ensure you have established channels for collecting customer feedback and a team ready to act on the insights provided by Enterpret. The tool’s effectiveness depends on your priority to action the feedback it provides.

3. Pepper Content: Optimizing Content Marketing for Product Launches & Customer Acquisition

Problem: Creating engaging and compelling content for product launches and updates is a resource-intensive process that can be difficult to scale. Without the ability to quickly produce high-quality content, companies struggle to maintain consistent communication with their audience, affecting brand awareness and customer engagement. This bottleneck in content production can delay marketing campaigns and reduce their overall impact, making it challenging for companies to achieve their growth objectives.

Solution: Pepper Content combines human expertise with AI to enhance content marketing efforts, particularly during product launches and for customer acquisition. The platform helps create compelling content that resonates with target audiences and drives engagement. By leveraging AI to streamline content creation processes, Pepper Content enables companies to scale their marketing efforts efficiently. This hybrid approach ensures that content is produced faster, highly relevant, and tailored to the audience’s interests, leading to better engagement and conversion rates.

My Experience: I’ve always written my own blog posts, but I’m excited to try Pepper Content. I would never want to rely solely on AI or solely on a human, but having both in the mix would be ideal. The combination of human intelligence and AI efficiency could elevate the quality and reach of my content while saving me time.

Example Use Case: Naukri.com, a job portal company, used Pepper Content to manage its extensive content needs. Pepper Content helped Naukri.com create detailed blog posts, social media updates, and email campaigns for product launches. The AI analyzed what content formats and messages performed best, ensuring each piece of content effectively drove engagement and conversions. This strategy significantly boosted Naukri.com’s customer acquisition efforts.

Caution: While AI can significantly speed up content creation, ensure you maintain a balance between AI-generated and human-crafted content to keep your brand voice authentic and engaging. Always provide detailed outlines, sample high-performing content, and review the content output provided.

4. UnSurvey: Scaling Sales Enablement & Competitive Analysis

Problem: Gathering and analyzing information at scale is time-consuming and challenging. For example, understanding why deals are won or lost is critical, yet traditional methods often rely on limited data from a handful of interviews. This limited feedback scope can lead to skewed insights and an incomplete understanding of customer objections and competitive dynamics. Without comprehensive win/loss analysis, sales teams may miss critical patterns and fail to address key issues that affect their success rates, resulting in lost opportunities and revenue.

Solution: UnSurvey uses AI to scale survey and data collection. It creates personalized conversational agents to gather and analyze information at scale, providing comprehensive insights from hundreds of interactions. This can help with win/loss analysis and other use cases, providing comprehensive insights. By conducting dynamic and personalized voice and text conversations at scale, UnSurvey transforms feedback collection into engaging interactions, helping teams refine their strategies. Businesses gain high-quality insights from a broad sample of interactions, leading to more accurate and actionable data. With UnSurvey, companies can better understand the reasons behind their sales outcomes and make data-driven adjustments to improve their win rates.

My Experience: Creating Win/Loss notes and other surveys was previously time-consuming and not scalable. With UnSurvey, I can quickly understand win/loss reasons, helping PMs improve the product and drive improved sales. This scalability and accuracy of feedback collection are game-changers for refining our strategies.

Example Use Case: A hypothetical example could be HubSpot, a leading CRM and marketing platform, using UnSurvey to gather extensive feedback on why specific deals are lost to competitors. The AI-driven insights help HubSpot understand common objections and competitive threats, allowing it to improve its sales pitches and product offerings. This data-driven approach significantly enhances their win rates and sales strategy.

Caution: To get the most out of UnSurvey, ensure you have a workflow set up that quickly and automatically gets the Survey into the hands of customers won and lost. Don’t manually send the Survey out — UnSurvey should make your life easier, not add more work! You don’t want to wait days, or the data and insights won’t be great.

5. TofuHQ: Your AI-Powered B2B Marketing Sidekick

Problem: B2B marketing teams face the challenge of efficiently scaling content creation and personalizing go-to-market (GTM) strategies for diverse personas, industries, and accounts. This includes effectively repurposing content across various channels and formats, often leading to underutilized resources and budgets due to manual processes.

Solution: TofuHQ harnesses AI as an automated marketing playbook, enabling teams to generate and scale hyper-personalized marketing campaigns across all channels. This “AI Content Factory” facilitates creating, personalizing, and repurposing content for marketing emails, SDR sequences, landing pages, white papers, ebooks, case studies, sales decks, blog posts, ad campaigns, and social posts. It ensures that all content is consistently on-brand and on-message, automates the publication process on native channels, and enables real-time performance analysis to optimize campaigns dynamically.

My Experience: Previously, creating new landing pages for campaigns took me hours, especially for different audiences and use cases in paid social and digital campaigns. Updating 20 landing pages with other priorities would have taken me months. With TofuHQ, I can quickly create multiple landing pages tailored to specific audiences. This gives me significant efficiencies while maintaining my brand voice, messaging, and company positioning—a game-changer.

Example Use Case: Golioth, a platform for managing IoT devices, utilizes TofuHQ to optimize landing pages for different customer segments. By using AI to test various headlines, images, and calls to action, Golioth can identify the most effective combinations, thus improving lead conversion rates and reducing customer acquisition costs. This method is pivotal in refining their online marketing strategy and boosting their sales pipeline. Moreover, TofuHQ aids Golioth in scaling its marketing efforts and generating hyper-personalized campaigns across multiple channels, significantly enhancing overall reach and engagement.

Caution: The more information you provide to TofuHQ, the better it performs. Be sure to share your brand messaging, positioning, voice, and sample content. Additionally, always review any AI outputs to ensure they align with your expectations.

6. Daydream: AI Insights and Reporting for GTM Teams

Problem: Go-to-market teams often find it challenging to synthesize data from various sources into actionable insights that inform their strategies. This data fragmentation can lead to missed opportunities and inefficient decision-making, hindering the effectiveness of marketing and sales initiatives. Without a unified view of critical metrics, GTM teams may struggle to align their efforts and optimize their strategies for maximum impact.

Solution: Daydream provides AI-driven insights and reporting for go-to-market (GTM) teams, helping them make informed decisions quickly. The platform synthesizes data from various sources to deliver actionable insights. Daydream enables GTM teams to track critical metrics and adjust their strategies in real-time by providing a comprehensive and unified view of marketing performance. This holistic approach ensures that all marketing and sales strategy aspects are aligned and optimized for success, leading to improved efficiency and better business outcomes.

My Experience: I’ve always wanted a tool like Daydream. Not having self-serve data or waiting for data analysts/engineers to build Looker dashboards often took weeks, forcing me to make marketing decisions with incomplete data or rely on SQL queries. With Daydream, I can easily see trends with my data in a presentable way that’s easy to understand and share with senior leaders. The templates are a lifesaver, providing a straightforward way and structured process to track key metrics and performance indicators. It’s truly a game-changer.

Example Use Case: Daydream’s “SaaS Marketing Performance” template helps SaaS companies build a profitable marketing engine by tracking performance throughout the sales funnel. This template enables companies to monitor key metrics and adjust their real-time strategies. For instance, a SaaS company can use Daydream to track how marketing activities influence conversions and customer retention. It provides a comprehensive view of their marketing effectiveness.

Caution: To get the best results from Daydream, ensure you’re effectively capturing your data sources and that your team is trained to act on the insights provided. Regularly review and update your data inputs to keep the analyses relevant and accurate.

Integrating AI into the Product Marketing Lifecycle

Integrating AI into the product marketing lifecycle is not just about adopting new tools but transforming how teams operate. Here’s how B2B startups can leverage AI at different stages of their product marketing:

  1. Market Research and Intelligence. During the initial stages of product development, AI tools like Runic can analyze vast datasets to identify market opportunities and customer needs. This intelligence shapes the product’s features and positioning, ensuring it meets actual market demands.
  2. Customer Feedback and Product Iteration. Once a product is in development or launched, platforms like Enterpret become essential. Continuous feedback collection and analysis ensure that the product evolves based on actual user experiences and preferences, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention.
  3. Content Creation and Distribution. AI tools like Pepper Content streamline content creation for product launches and updates. AI helps teams craft effective marketing campaigns that drive engagement and conversions by understanding what content formats and messages resonate with the target audience.
  4. Sales and Marketing Optimization. During the sales process, UnSurvey provides deep insights into win/loss scenarios, enabling teams to refine their strategies. Meanwhile, TofuHQ scales landing pages and other content, ensuring every potential customer has a high chance of converting, enhancing the overall effectiveness of marketing efforts.
  5. Go-to-Market Strategy and Execution. Finally, tools like Daydream offer comprehensive insights and reporting, enabling GTM teams to make data-driven decisions. This holistic view ensures that all aspects of the marketing strategy are aligned and optimized for success.

Conclusion

AI is not a silver bullet but a powerful enabler that can transform B2B product marketing from reactive to proactive, from generic to highly personalized. By integrating AI tools like Runic, Enterpret, Pepper Content, UnSurvey, TofuHQ, and Daydream, startups can enhance their marketing strategies at every product lifecycle stage. These tools provide the insights and efficiencies needed to create products that meet market demands and exceed customer expectations.

In a world where 69% of products fail to resonate with customers, leveraging AI to understand, engage, and delight users is not just advantageous—it’s essential. For B2B startups navigating the competitive landscape, AI-driven product marketing can be the differentiator that propels them to success.

About the Author
Cindy Berman is a seasoned product marketing and growth leader with extensive experience guiding startups like Segment, Productboard, Grammarly, and Vowel. With a deep understanding of the AI landscape, Cindy is dedicated to helping businesses leverage AI to achieve their marketing goals. She holds an MBA from Wharton and is an active angel investor, having made 17 investments, many of which leverage AI.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Sheezan Bakali

From social to email, competition for eyeballs is intensifying. So, what is the next best channel for growing brands? Enter SMS, the low-cost and increasingly effective channel that you should invest in now.

I use the SMS search engine Tiny Texts to track every text that top brands send, and it provides insights into how often brands are leaning into text. For example, Crocs sends 7 to 8 texts per month. Alice and Olivia sent 12 texts in just the first couple weeks of June.

Tiny Texts Homepage

One of the reasons SMS is growing and will continue to grow is the relationship younger consumers have with texting. SMS is openly embraced by Gen Z, the brands they run, and the brands they love. Chamberlain Coffee, the brand started by YouTuber Emma Chamberlain, sends 8 to 9 texts per month.

I’m also seeing higher open and conversion rates on SMS than email. On average, over 95% of SMS messages are opened and read within the first three minutes of delivery, compared to email open rates which average around 20-30% for most businesses.

Whether you are trying to drive first-time purchasers or increase LTV from your most loyal customers, there is plenty to learn from these 6 brands highlighted below.

1. Alo

Alo uses newness to drive traffic via text

Alo’s business and marketing strategy relies heavily on new product drops to drive momentum. In the last year, Alo has introduced skiwear, formalwear, skincare, supplements, and plenty of celebrity collaborations. So, it’s no surprise that their text messaging strategy also focuses heavily on new product announcements. 

Roughly every 2 to 7 days Alo texts subscribers with a new color drop, announcing the arrival of shades like Wild Berry, Espresso, Bluestone, Olive Tree, and Midnight Green. Scan their past texts, and you will see new color drops make up a large portion of the messaging strategy. That doesn’t mean the new colors are their best-selling items, it just means announcing new colors drives traffic.

Cher Fuller, Alo’s Senior Director of Digital Marketing, told Glossy in 2023 that promoting their Barbie-esque shade Paradise Pink drove clicks, but if the subscriber converted, it was black leggings they purchased first. A bright color or trendy item may be the fun thing that brings you in, but it’s not where new customers are converting, Fuller said.

Alo New DropAlo New Drop 2

2. Skims

Skims is committed to MMS

MMS, multimedia message, refers to texts with an image or gif. Among fashion brands and retailers, we see a variety of approaches to images in texts. Khaite never includes images. Bergdorf never includes images either. & Other Stories sometimes includes images. But Skims is all in on MMS.

MMS messages do not always drive better click-through rates, but I have encouraged brands I work with, like Steven Alan and Marion Parke, to at least test MMS alongside different types of copy. If you’re paying attention to costs, this does add up. For example, brands using Attentive for text messaging spend about $0.0175 to send each SMS message, and about $.04250 to send each MMS. Even with the increased cost, it may be worth testing to find out whether an image increases the click-through rate or conversion rate on say, a new product drop or cart abandonment text. 

But for brands with gorgeous photography like Skims, the decision to go all in makes sense. Every Skims text includes an image. As a result, their text thread is colorful, eye-catching, and sexy, and if I had to guess I would bet they have a lower unsubscribe rate than their peers.

FRAME, a denim brand that regularly includes gifs in its texts, is another fun one to watch.

Skims

3. The Beachwaver Co.

Beachwaver integrates text with other marketing channels

By combining SMS with other tactics, you can create a cohesive and omnichannel customer journey. An obvious and common example: send an email then follow up with an SMS reminder. Text also integrates nicely with social, in-store messaging, and even broadcast.

The Beachwaver Co. puts SMS to work in many ways. Scanning their recent texts, they send their subscribers a message roughly every 1 to 5 days promoting sitewide sales and discount codes. But I especially like how they integrate SMS with another emerging marketing tactic – live shopping.

Beachwaver hosts live videos multiple times a week, pulling in hundreds of thousands of views. Some videos demonstrate their patented curling iron, and some feature founder Sarah Potempa packing orders from their warehouse. If you have ever contemplated live shopping before, ensuring there are enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile is a valid concern. But if you have been cultivating an engaged base of text subscribers like Beachwaver has, then text is the perfect setting to announce when you go live.

4. FWRD

FWRD’s triggered messages create a personalized experience

FWRD is relatively new to texting, and so far, they are leaning into triggered messages as much as campaigns. FWRD frequently reminds me of the item waiting for me in my cart and compliments my good taste. I also get very frequent browse abandonment flows from them, which may be a reflection of how often I window shop on their site, how aggressively they are chasing non-converting traffic, or both.

Other smart uses of triggered text messages include low stock and restock notifications and loyalty rewards. If you collect birthdates from your customers, I love birthday text messages, and I see everyone from Sephora to the LA Dodgers using my birthday as a reason to engage.

5. Slutty Vegan

Slutty Vegan uses provocative texts for brand-building and engagement

You may not be familiar yet with Slutty Vegan, a vegan burger chain that began as an Instagram home-based business in 2018. In the past six years, it grew to 12 locations and recently sold a 25% stake to Danny Meyer. Part of this growth can be attributed to Slutty Vegan’s edgy, provocative, and culturally relevant brand. The slutty theme runs throughout the menu (with items like the Ménage à Trois), decor (neon signs remind you to “Eat Plants You Slut”), service (at the cash wrap first-time customers are referred to as “virgin sluts”), and texts.

I have been drawn in by Slutty Vegan’s provocative and sneaky texts many times, and usually find myself chuckling at the ways they get me to quickly open their messages. “I miss you”, “Turn around 👀,” “I have something to tell you,” and “This is my last time sending you nudes,” followed by a vegan burger pic or a reminder of Slutty Vegan’s store locations.  It’s a perfect example of what I always say about funny people in general, they take chances and while they might annoy you from time to time they don’t let that stop them.

Slutty Vegan incorporates its unique brand into text better than any other brand I have seen. Though for a second runner-up, read about Fashion Nova’s unhinged approach to text here.

Slutty Vegan 1 of 2Slutty Vegan 2 of 2

6. The New York Post

The New York Post uses text to provide an interesting VIP experience

This example is a little different because I pay to receive these texts. For $4.99 a month, I subscribe to Post Sports+, a premium sports membership from the New York Post, that offers the opportunity to “Text with The Experts.” I get exclusive stories and analysis, and opportunities to interact with sportswriters like NHL reporter Mollie Walker and NCAA reporter Zach Braziller, all through text.

For example, Zach Braziller explained what was happening with college basketball players Chris Ledlum and Jordan Dingle, and sent me a link to the judge’s decision as soon as it was published. And Mollie Palmer regularly sends me NHL previews, line-ups, predictions, and post-game wrap-ups. Her texts come in at all hours of the day and sometimes when I’m lying on the couch at 9 p.m. and she reminds me to watch the game, it feels like I paid $4.99 for a new friend.

Conclusion

Text is just one piece of a comprehensive marketing strategy, but if you embrace it you can have a lot of fun with it and get a lot of mileage out of it. Now is a perfect time to explore SMS, and there are plenty of providers who can help. The brands I mentioned here are using SMS platforms like Community, Attentive, and Subtext, but there are many other options depending on your strategy and budget.

About the Author
Sheezan Bakali is a CMO who works with high growth, digital native consumer brands and brings experience from her work at Outdoor Voices, Blue Apron, Red Bull, Puma, Abercrombie & Fitch, Fab.com, and more.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Cheryl Tan

These are exciting times for those of us in the e-commerce sector. The introduction of disruptive new technologies coupled with the coming-of-age of a digitally-native generation is giving rise to a flurry of new developments in this space. Here are some noteworthy trends that could have an impact on your e-commerce go-to-market strategy:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) for greater personalization and lower operational costs

Artificial Intelligence continues its prevalence in all aspects of our lives, and both consumers and retailers are just as eager to jump on the AI bandwagon.

Personalized Shopping Experiences. While personalization of the customer journey itself is not a new concept, companies are now leveraging AI to analyze customer data and behavior, allowing for even more deeply personalized product recommendations and marketing strategies. AI-powered chatbots can provide instant customer support and assistance, addressing concerns and reducing abandonment.

Automated Content Creation. AI-powered content tools such as Jasper.ai and Canva ensure faster time-to-market for new products and promotions. These AI-generated images and marketing campaigns can dramatically reduce costs associated with traditional content creation.

2. Adoption of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR)

As more consumers become familiar with AR and VR, e-commerce companies are better positioned to adopt these technologies to enhance the shopping experience.

Immersive Product Experiences. AR allows customers to visualize products in their environment, leading to higher confidence in purchasing decisions. VR-powered virtual stores create an engaging shopping experience similar to physical retail environments. There are also opportunities for more innovative marketing. Brands can create viral campaigns and interactive experiences using AR filters and VR simulations.

Virtual Try-on Before You Buy. AR helps customers accurately assess product dimensions and features before purchasing, reducing the likelihood of returns. Virtual try-on experiences for fashion and beauty products improve customer satisfaction and decrease return rates. For example, Perfect Corp allows customers to try on products virtually which drives both improved conversion as well as lower return rates.

3. In-App Shopping Experiences

E-commerce has moved beyond our browsers into native apps, and more e-commerce retailers are finding ways to convert consumers within content-driven apps like TikTok and Instagram.

Enhanced User Engagement and Conversion. Seamless integration of shopping features within popular apps like TikTok and Instagram enhances user convenience and reduces friction in the buying process, reducing the steps from product discovery to checkout. In-app notifications, personalized recommendations, and even exclusive offers can incentivize immediate purchases and improve user retention and conversion rates.

Data Monetization Opportunities. In-app shopping data provides valuable insights into user behavior and preferences for targeted advertising and product recommendations – including real-time feedback so companies can be responsive to trending topics and products. Partnerships with app developers and influencers can also create new revenue streams through affiliate marketing and sponsored content.

4. Flexible E-commerce Payments

At the last step in the purchase funnel, e-commerce retailers can now offer a flurry of payment options to remove any hurdles to final order confirmation.

Buy Now, Pay Later. The number of e-commerce transactions using “buy now pay later” services from companies such as Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay continues to grow. According to a recent report from Adobe, a record high of $25.9 billion of e-commerce spending between January 2024 and April 2024 involved BNPL platforms, accounting for an 11.8% year-over-year increase. This offers a new payment option for customers who may not historically have had access to credit.

Mobile Payment and Digital Wallets. Digitally-savvy customers are adopting mobile-first commerce, and 60% of e-commerce transactions are now happening on mobile devices. The use of digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal is fast becoming the e-commerce payment channel of choice worldwide, and companies are quickly integrating digital wallet and mobile payment options into their purchase funnel.

5. Sustainability across the E-commerce Value Chain

As consumers place an increasing weight on sustainability and consider moving away from fast fashion and non-biodegradable materials, e-commerce companies are finding ways to leverage sustainable practices to grow customer loyalty while reducing costs along the supply chain.

Sustainability commitments to drive brand loyalty. E-commerce retailers are seeing that a serious commitment to sustainable practices can enhance their brand credibility with eco-conscious consumers. Companies like Patagonia, Blueland, and Allbirds have invested in more consumer education and awareness campaigns to encourage more sustainable consumption habits while enhancing their brand reputation.

Innovation in recycling and waste reduction. More retailers are adopting eco-friendly packaging and materials and are investing in circular economy initiatives, which can, in turn, increase recycling adoption, reduce waste throughout their product lifecycle, and lower operational costs in the long run. To reduce their carbon footprint, companies are also encouraging customers to choose slower shipping methods, which often involve ground transportation, which is generally more fuel-efficient than air freight. They may pass on the savings in the form of discounts to consumers to persuade them to choose the greener and more cost-effective shipping choice – a win-win for everyone.

Conclusion

While e-commerce trends do evolve, leveraging the latest technology can help improve operational efficiency while enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement. Companies must continue to stay abreast of relevant trends and consider how to best position themselves to leverage each relevant opportunity and remain competitive in the digital age.

About the Author
Cheryl Tan (Harvard MBA, former McKinsey) is a fractional CMO, brand strategist and business builder. She’s developed and executed against marketing strategy with community-led brands like Stella & Dot, KonMari (founded by tidying guru Marie Kondo), Minted, and True Botanicals. She also advises enterprises in technology, automotive, chemicals, and healthcare that are looking to unlock new growth via digital transformation. Learn more about her consulting practice at cheryltanconsulting.com.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Anthony Scarpaci

Ever since Open AI released its first public version of ChatGPT in late 2022, marketer enthusiasm for generative AI and its potential applications across industries exploded and has only continued to dominate the conversation around the (often virtual) watercooler.

While many have written lists of potential applications, innovations, & use cases for marketing, I wanted to contextualize the landscape and trends to map them back to how marketers work to deliver results for their brands.

What follows is my attempt to highlight what is driving real utility for marketers today and what is on the horizon they should consider in their strategy for the future.

Discovery & Research

At the beginning of every marketing campaign is the critical work to uncover the customer insights that drive the big idea. Historically, this was achieved through qualitative (interviews, panels, and open-field survey responses) and quantitative (multiple-choice questionnaires) means. Alongside this brand-led research, companies like Yelp, Trustpilot, and marketplaces like Amazon, the Apple App Store, and the Google Play Store capture millions of unfiltered customer reviews.

As this open-field text feedback continues to proliferate, it has become an increasing challenge to sift through it all and make any sense of it (the best some could do were basic word cloud exercises) — until now.

Opportunity: Use a large language model like ChatGPT to mine your customer feedback for insights
Whether asking the tool to review publicly available data or uploading your internal customer verbatim response data, ask the platform to generate insights from that customer feedback, such as:

  • What do your customers love and hate most about your product or service?
  • What problem are they trying to solve?
  • What recommendations do they have to improve your offerings?

Using these tools to synthesize your customer feedback can be incredibly powerful in triggering new ideas and ways to reposition your brand offering in the most compelling way possible.

Briefing The Team

Once you’ve gathered your customer insights, it is now time to prepare your strategic plan, brief your team, and kick off your next campaign. At this stage, some struggle with how to structure their project document to ensure it addresses all the key elements your stakeholders need to do their best work and hit the goals of the campaign. Thanks to AI, no longer do team members need to stare at a blank Google or Word document while figuring out where to start.

Opportunity: Use embedded tools in word processing platforms like Google Docs’ Gemini, Chrome extensions like the ones Reforge or Grammarly offer, and custom GPTs to accelerate the planning process

Google’s new “Help Me Write” feature and Reforge’s recently launched Chrome extension, for example, can help generate templates for your team for project briefs and planning exercises. Beyond the initial templates, these and other tools can review your work and provide instant feedback, suggestions, and ways to improve your writing for clarity. For less experienced team members, these tools can quickly raise the bar for their initial draft proposals and planning documents when time with their managers may be limited. There are even tailored GPTs now that can provide tailored growth product and marketing feedback directly that you can chat with to refine your thinking as you build your plan.

Developing Creative

Now that you’ve done the customer research and kicked off the project with your marketing team, it’s time to bring the ideas to life! More than ever, speed to market and a consistent, rapid creative pipeline of digital assets are critical to building and maintaining momentum for your brand. One essential pillar for many brands’ creative strategy is user-generated content and testimonial ads through paid social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Google Shorts. Here, creative fatigue can happen far more rapidly than advertisers may be used to with legacy channels like linear television. So, how does a brand with resource-constrained marketing teams keep up?

Opportunity: Enable non-technical team members to generate and edit video creative

Whether workshopping ideas or developing final ad copy, AI-based tools have been proliferating to speed up different steps of the ad development process.

  • Some solutions, like Uplifted.ai, enable the immediate capture of customer testimonial assets and transforms them into ads instantly, inclusive of polished edits of the footage alongside product imagery.
  • Others, like descript.com, allow marketers to edit video creative as easily as a Google or Microsoft Word doc, no longer requiring skills in video editing software to cut out or rearrange lines in a video creative.
  • Beyond these novel emerging tools, ad platforms Google and others continue experimenting with embedded features to achieve similar goals. Google for example now has functionality within Youtube and Performance Max campaigns to natively generate and edit video and display assets.
  • Even if you don’t feel ready to test these tools, you can use LLMs to quickly help with script and copy ideation to start.

While you shouldn’t expect perfection, these tools can rapidly accelerate the speed of concept development and ad generation.

Serving the Ads & Optimizing the Campaigns

With creative in hand, you now need to get your message in the market. The digital ad platforms you’ll be running on are constantly working to improve their targeting capabilities to help you drive performance at scale and automate as much of the execution as possible. However, the downside of this effort is that as they try to make it easier on marketers, they’ve built effective black boxes that brands cannot peer into, understand, or improve upon based on their business context. You are effectively left to trust that the advertising oligarchy is delivering the best possible performance for you, allowing them to spend some of your budget on low-quality inventory and audiences. Here, instead of highlighting a new trend, I want to issue a word of caution.

Opportunity: As you scale spend in your campaigns, segment them by intent-based customer cohorts.

As these platforms move towards all-in-one offerings like Google’s Performance Max or Meta’s and programmatic’s broad targeting algorithms, you must remember they are optimizing for their revenue maximization — not your incremental customer acquisition maximization. As a result, their platforms inherently have an embedded conflict of interest. They are not incentivized away from potentially high-cannibalization activities like branded search bidding or site retargeting advertisements. Nor are they motivated to ruthlessly cut low-quality (or even unviewable) ad inventory. As a result, as you begin to spend more, it is imperative to consider structuring your campaigns to manage your spend, reach, and campaign outcomes accordingly – from pure prospecting to retargeting and beyond.

Maximizing Customer LTV

Now that you’ve acquired the customers, it is time to maximize their revenue potential by boosting product adoption, repeat purchase habits, upgrades, and reducing churn. Historically, the marketing arm of this strategy has been executed by a robust manual set of structured CDP logic and CRM drip campaigns with pre-defined and rigid if-then logic for customers based on their tenure, actions, and other triggers. But is there a better way?

Opportunity: Leverage the emerging AI-based campaign automation logic

CDP and CRM platforms like Aampe and Braze are breaking new ground in how a customer marketing team can increase their influence on sales. They are building a new way to think about the ideal sequence of customer touchpoints across SMS, email, push, and in-app notifications. Instead of rigid logic based on fixed rules, some platforms can constantly test the timing, frequency, and sequencing of messages to maximize ROI at a user level. This accelerates the potential path to revenue maximization much faster than the old way of doing things – where brands are trying to optimize a local maximum KPI for a large customer segment – through A/B testing that can take weeks to execute, learn from, and roll out. (Imagine a world where AI has solved customer frequency questions and there is no more internal debate on how many emails are too many to send to your customers!)

Analyzing The Results

You’ve taken a marketing campaign from idea to execution, and now the campaign is over. Did it hit your goals? Did it result in better outcomes? As you dig into the data, the sheer volume of metrics to review can be overwhelming. (Side note: Some marketers have argued that Marketing is a more analytically demanding discipline than Finance within an organization – but I’ll leave that debate to another time.) So, how do you make sense of all the data with limited time and resources and know where to focus? Let’s go back to where we started, with LLMs like ChatGPT.

Opportunity: Provide your structured campaign data to a large language model and ask it about trends

While these services cannot replace your team’s intuition, context, and understanding of your business and marketing data, they can help spotlight the best places to look. Use these tools to get ideas of the trends, what anomalies stand out, and where you might want to dig in further. It may surprise you what metrics you didn’t think to focus on might be the key to unlocking why your campaign over- or under-performed expectations.

Final Thoughts

Advancements in AI to increase your marketing team’s leverage are increasing at an ever-accelerating rate, and so many of them are available for you to use today. They will enable your team to do more with less and drive greater outcomes for your business at a rate previously thought impossible.

As you experiment with these capabilities, I recommend you keep in mind a few tenets along the way:

Notes: I am not affiliated with any of the brands mentioned in this article. And no, I did not use AI to write the article.

About the Author
Anthony Scarpaci is a seasoned growth marketing advisor with over 12 years of in-house experience leading consumer and B2B marketing teams at high-growth subscription, fintech, and app companies, including Acorns, Nerdwallet, and Betterment. He has managed customer acquisition budgets exceeding $100 million, demonstrating his expertise in scaling, optimizing, and diversifying customer acquisition and onboarding to maximize ROI. Anthony’s proficiency covers a wide range of growth strategies, including digital and offline media, influencer marketing, referrals, partnerships, affiliate marketing, CRO, ASO, SEO, and lifecycle marketing. For more information, visit his LinkedIn profile or at Tunomatic.com.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Libby Weissman
This article was originally published on Libby’s Substack.   

When growth isn’t meeting expectations, where do you focus time and energy to fix the problem?

If you’re working in a marketing-led business, you might be asking yourself questions like:

1. Is my content resonating with the audience?
2. Am I marketing in the right channels?
3. Do I have the right tech stack?
4. Is the product positioned wrong?
5. Is the product itself good enough?

Marketing can so often feel like a black box, and as a former General Manager turned Marketing leader who’s worked with 15+ startups, I see three reasons why.

1. Marketing is a delicate system. Product, content, brand, and growth marketing elements must work together. If one part of the system is working well, but another isn’t, the whole system falls apart.

2. Most marketers aren’t system thinkers. Most marketing leaders come up through one marketing discipline—SEO, content marketing, paid social media, product marketing, brand strategy, etc.—and struggle to shake the bias of that discipline as they advance in their careers.

3. Marketers and stakeholders speak different languages. Sales, finance, and often CEOs all speak the language of the P&L—revenue, sales, acquisition, and profits. Many marketers speak the language of campaigns, creative briefs, impressions, and clicks. Successful marketing leaders translate between these two languages, but when that’s missing, it leads to a lot of misunderstanding on both sides.

Investigating the Black Box

I’ve seen marketing leaders and founders struggle to properly allocate marketing budgets and resources to drive repeatable, profitable growth. It often feels like a game of Whac-A-Mole — as soon as one thing is fixed, you realize something else is broken.

It’s tempting to start fixing the most urgent or obvious problem, but when it comes to the black box of marketing, the only thing I’ve seen work is applying a systems-thinking approach to diagnosing the root cause (or causes).

This article introduces the 11 components of a healthy marketing system. I’ll dive deep into each component, outlining how it impacts the overall marketing system and sharing specific questions to help you properly diagnose its performance in your organization.

Before we get into it:

1. Do all of these steps apply to every marketing team? This framework is relevant for scaling, post-product market fit companies using marketing as their primary growth motion and spending at least ~$2M annually on marketing (including headcount and budget).

2. Where should I start if I’m early in setting up my marketing-led growth engine? You need a much lighter-weight version of this system that still includes elements from all three pillars. I’ll publish a post that goes into more detail about applying systems thinking to early-stage startup marketing soon!

Checking Marketing’s Vitals

The 11 components are divided into strategy and execution across the four major marketing disciplines: brand, product, content, and growth. Let’s start with the basics:

Here’s how the 11 components shake out:

11 Components

  1. 💖 Brand strategy: Do you have a clearly defined purpose (why your brand exists) and values (principles to guide your brand’s behavior/decision-making) that help your audience understand what you stand for?
  2. 🎯 Positioning: Is your product creating differentiated value for a clearly defined target audience?
  3. 💬 Messaging: What are the reasons (and the evidence) customers should try your product? 
  4. 🏛 Pillars: Does all of your content connect back to a few core themes?
  5. 📆 Calendar: Do you have a regular cadence of content tied to moments in your customer’s life and your product’s roadmap?
  6. 📣 Distribution Advantages: Are you activated in channels that fit your customer, product, and business model? 
  7. 📊 Growth Model: Do you have clear goals for channel tactics that connect to your broader business goals?
  8. 📄 Briefs: Do you have a process for converting content ideas into creative deliverables (copy, visual)? 
  9. 🎥 Production: Is your content varied & high-quality?
  10. 🩺 Channel health: Are your channels following best practices (optimization, creative, measurement)?
  11. 🏃‍♀️ Operating cadence: Do you have robust rituals to track performance to goals, collect learnings, and adapt?

Diagnosing Common Syndromes

So, what do startups get wrong? Across the organizations I’ve worked with, I see a few typical profiles:

Silver Bullet Syndrome: These startups have seen short bursts of success from various tactics and are relentlessly pursuing “the next big idea” but have no repeatable and predictable growth engine. They tend to be underdeveloped across all the fundamentals, with the most significant weaknesses in execution (📄, 🎥, 🩺, 🏃‍♀️). Their founders tend to be unstructured thinkers who love to host a brainstorm.

Silver Bullet Syndrome

Measurement Syndrome: These startups have a rigorous approach to measuring growth and are constantly experimenting but aren’t consistently converting prospects. They have strengths in growth marketing strategy and execution (📣, 📊, 🩺, 🏃‍♀️) but come up short in content marketing strategy (🏛, 📆) and brand marketing (💖). Their founders tend to be left-brained operators who are skeptical of the creative parts of marketing and do their best thinking in SQL.

Measurement Syndrome

Perfectionist Syndrome: These startups deeply understand their customer and have flawless strategy docs to prove it—but struggle to convert that strategy into a growth engine. They have strengths in strategy across many dimensions (🎯, 🏛, 📣, 💬, 📆, 📊) but need to improve in executing content and growth (8, 9, 10, 11). Their founders tend to be ex-consultants (Matt Lerner calls these founders “overthinkers” in his new book) who thrive during an annual planning meeting.

Perfectionist Syndrome

Beautiful Things Syndrome: These startups churn out high-quality, entertaining, and beautiful content. They have strengths in content marketing strategy (🏛, 📆) and execution (📄, 🎥) as well as brand strategy (💖) but weaknesses in growth marketing (📣, 📊, 🩺, 🏃‍♀️). Their founders tend to come from large brands with > 90% brand awareness (where the focus was on catchy campaigns rather than building distribution) and light up most in a creative review.

Beautiful Things Syndrome

Closing Thoughts

Like any complicated system, if a diagnosis is rushed, it’s easy to focus on fixing the wrong thing.

I know the exhausting feeling of sprinting at a problem, only to fix it and find the system no better off. This is why so many marketing leaders end up burned out or fired, and their counterparts are left feeling even more confused about what marketing is and how to get it to work.

Subscribe if you want to dive deeper with me into each component:

 

About the Author
Libby Weissman is a growth advisor who helps startups implement & improve their marketing-led growth engines. Libby brings together lessons from her early-stage experience as VP of Marketing at Realm, scaling experience as Head of Marketing at Caviar (acquired by DoorDash), and advising experience across dozens of startups. To dive deeper into the elements of a high-performing marketing system, follow her Substack.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Daniel Pietrucha

Trends toward increased automation and machine-learning technology in digital marketing have decreased focus on audience strategies within paid search. With the ascendancy of Google’s Performance Max ad format, handing more control over to the algorithm – whether for bids, creative, audiences, etc. – is increasingly de rigueur. Indeed, PMax doesn’t even allow traditional audience targeting within paid search context (or even in display and video contexts), relying instead on ‘audience signals’, which are superficially similar, but functionally quite different.

But audience targeting can play a meaningful role in driving better paid search performance, specifically in the current climate where profitability has come to the fore. For teams with the right data sets and ability to execute, more sophisticated audience strategies are worthy of exploration. Before proceeding to a high-level overview of some of these more advanced audience targeting strategies, we’ll provide some brief background on audience targeting in Google.

Audience Types: Narrowing the Focus

Google offers several different options for audience targeting within its platform, from demographic targeting to in-market audiences. Not all of these apply to paid search; a few aren’t available to search and shopping campaigns, while others are better leveraged in display and video formats.

From Google:

Our focus below will be on ‘your data segments’; or data gathered through analytics and CRM platforms. These seem to be the most impactful audiences within a paid search context and those most intimately related to important concerns like profitability and efficient customer acquisition.

Observation vs. Targeting

When applying audiences to search or shopping campaigns, observation and targeting are two options. “Observation” allows for audience-specific data to be collected for a given campaign or ad group without narrowing its scope. In observation, ads remain eligible to serve to users outside of explicitly observed audience segments – so long as the user searches a suitably relevant query.

In contrast, “Targeting” an audience segment restricts ad service to that particular segment. Both audience membership and a relevant search query are necessary conditions for an ad to be triggered.

Each option has its utility, but I tend to see “Observation” as a precursor to “Targeting”. While data from observed segments can influence campaign performance, it’s the shift from passive observation to active targeting that generates more interesting results. The latter approach, however, is a more advanced tactic that’s possibly inappropriate for accounts with limited conversion data or smaller audience segments. We’ll get into some of these challenges in a later section.

Why use audiences in search campaigns?

Audience data for search campaigns would be of little interest if it weren’t actionable. In addition to providing valuable insights that can inform broader marketing strategy, there are direct benefits to paid search performance to utilizing audience lists in search campaigns.

For advertisers leveraging automated bidding, Google notes that first-party audience segments applied in “Observation” provide a signal that informs Smart Bidding (automated) strategies such as Target CPA and Target ROAS. Within this context, curating audience lists that provide meaningful information to the bid engine becomes critical. If users who read multiple pieces of your blog content are more likely to convert, create that audience segment, and get that data in front of the algorithm so it can bid accordingly. For those advertisers still utilizing manual bidding, bid adjustments (e.g. increase bid by 50%) can be applied to particularly high-performing audience segments to increase ad service to those audiences.

While the data captured through “Observation” can positively influence the performance of algorithmic bid strategies, there are additional benefits for advertisers who shift from this passive approach to actively targeting audience lists via search campaigns (including in Google Shopping).

Ad service can be materially different for audience segments when actively targeted via unique search campaigns versus aggregated with other users in generalized search or shopping campaigns. The main reason for this is that Smart Bidding strategies optimize at the campaign and ad group levels, while within those campaigns and ad groups, there can be substantial variation in performance across product sets, keywords, audiences, etc.

In other words, Google will balance performance between various ad group or campaign subcomponents to deliver on high-level return goals, but under the surface, large disparities can persist. By targeting an audience directly, advertisers can effectively tell Google their desired return goal for a specific audience segment, rather than have its performance balanced against a portfolio of other (very different) segments.

What this ultimately means is more control for advertisers. Active “Targeting” of audiences makes possible advanced strategies that provide advertisers with more control over how they engage with prospective and existing customers within a paid search context. Audience “Observation” remains an important phase one in this process, as the data collected in observation provides a benchmark for measuring the shift from passive to active audience targeting within search.

Below we’ll explore some of these advanced strategies at a high level, with a particular focus on audience lists related to user engagement and customer data.

Advanced Audience Strategies in Paid Search: Select Applications

1. Control customer acquisition costs

a. Acquiring new customers efficiently requires setting the right targets and effectively managing to those targets. Even if you have the math right on CAC, executing with precision will be a challenge when prospective and existing customers are targeted within the same campaign – and with the same efficiency target. Smart Bidding strategies optimize toward specific CPA or ROAS goals at the campaign or ad group level. While the overall bid strategy may be meeting its efficiency target, it could be overspending on new customers and bolstering the campaign average with high-performing buyer segments. The overarching principle of treating like cases alike and different cases differently favors breaking these very different user groups into distinct campaigns where they can be managed to their preferred efficiency. The benefits are transparency, control, and greater profitability.

2. Leverage customer lists to re-engage buyer segments

a. Retain customers by showing up in the right auctions. Customers aren’t always loyal. If they’re searching for a product you sell, but not your specific brand, they’re not necessarily committed to purchasing from you, even if their overall purchase intent is high. Targeting existing customers in non-brand search and shopping campaigns can help advertisers show up at critical moments when a sale might otherwise be lost to a competitor.

b. Manage efficiency to re-engage buyers profitably. Non-brand search and shopping campaigns can generate incremental sales from existing customers. Still, it may not be profitable to drive sales from these users at the same CPA or ROAS targets used in customer acquisition campaigns. Actively targeting buyers in separate campaigns allows for algorithmic bidding strategies to optimize for CPA or ROAS targets unique to buyers that are consistent with bottom-line goals.

c. Turn good customers into great ones. Leverage audience targeting to encourage more first-time purchasers to move into high lifetime value (LTV) customer segments by getting back in front of them during high-purchase intent moments. Maybe you have data that suggests that customers purchasing 2x in the first six months have materially higher LTV than the average customer, or that three purchases in the first year turn an average customer into a brand evangelist. There are many ways to approach this strategy, with the limitations primarily defined by the size of customer data sets and your ability to harvest unique insights that can be capitalized on in marketing contexts; companies like Wilde can help with the latter.

3. Retarget prospective customers near the bottom of the funnel

a. The customer journey is complex. Users often require multiple touches before conversion, especially for high-consideration products that are not only expensive but research-intensive. Musical instruments are a great example. While price points vary, high-end instruments can cost several thousands of dollars. Prospective customers spend hours watching comparison and review videos, reading blog content, and perusing technical details before ultimately making a purchase decision. Keeping a close eye on engagement signals – and bidding aggressively for users in search and shopping auctions when they are near the bottom of the funnel – ensures that investment in video and blog content isn’t going to waste. This approach can be particularly important for service industries where the sales cycle is much longer and the average deal value is much higher.

Brief Notes on PMax

Many advertisers and agencies are going all in on PMax, with Tinuiti reporting that 91% of their advertisers featured PMax campaigns as part of their marketing mix in Q4 2023. Interestingly, some other large agencies have been publicly signaling a shift away from this highly-automated format.

But regardless of one’s position on the importance of Performance Max campaigns within paid search accounts, the reality is that most of the strategies above cannot be executed – at least not with the same precision – when utilizing PMax versus traditional shopping or search campaigns.

As noted above, PMax does not allow for traditional audience targeting. Instead, PMax enables advertisers to provide audience signals, which are analogous to layering in audiences via ‘observation’ mode in search and shopping campaigns. But while analogous, there is – consistent with the general orientation of PMax – far less transparency: advertisers cannot observe key performance metrics (KPIs) for the specific audience applied as a signal.

PMax does have a new customer acquisition capability, so it is possible to segment prospective and existing customers and target them via unique campaigns. However, there are important differences in control over ad placements. The strategies above focus on delivering ads to users at critical junctures within search and shopping campaigns, but PMax doesn’t as yet allow advertisers to determine which ad format incremental ad spend is allocated toward. While your intention may be to be more aggressive within shopping auctions for certain audience segments, the ultimate effect may be a higher frequency of retargeting ads for this group of users.

This isn’t to say that PMax isn’t the right ad format for certain advertisers. Especially for those with lower budgets and limited conversion data, it may be a good first foray into the world of paid search, allowing for multi-ad format exposure focused on driving higher overall conversion volume. But for advertisers with more robust data sets and refined KPIs, there is a material reduction in control that comes with PMax. In some cases the improvement in performance is worth the reduced control and transparency; in many cases, it is not.

Complexities and Challenges

While the strategies above can yield interesting results, they’re also more difficult to execute, both in terms of creating the proper account structure and maintaining that structure. Limitations within particular platforms create additional challenges. Below are a few things to consider before implementing the strategies outlined above.

1. Google’s ability to matchback users isn’t perfect. One of the ways an advertiser might identify existing customers is through CRM data, which can be uploaded to Google to create audience lists composed of those particular customers. However Google cannot correctly identify every user based on this data, so the split between new and existing customers will be imperfect. It’s worth pairing Customer Match lists with GA4 audiences to increase the effectiveness of new versus existing customer segmentation (though this too is imperfect). For those with the right systems in place, new-to-file data should be monitored to gauge the efficacy of this approach to segmentation and calibrate efficiency targets accordingly. Note also that these CRM lists must be periodically updated to ensure data accuracy.

2. Close attention must be paid to account structure. Because of platform limitations on Google, effecting a split between prospective and existing customers requires utilizing campaign priority rules that funnel users to the desired campaign. Priority rules determine which campaign will take priority in the event multiple campaigns are eligible in the same auction. For example, a high-priority campaign might target existing customers; if a user is in the targeted audience segment, they will be served an ad from that campaign; if the user is not in that segment, they will receive an ad from a lower priority campaign. By funneling out existing customers via high-priority campaigns, lower-priority campaigns effectively focus on new customer acquisition. But things can quickly get complicated if there are multiple criteria for segmentation (e.g. product types, profit margin, additional audiences, etc.) Advertisers must evaluate the logic of the campaign structure to ensure it’s set up to flow users as intended.

3. Complex account structures have increased maintenance costs. Once you’ve confirmed the logic of a new account structure, new campaign launches need to be evaluated for how they fit in with the existing ecosystem. Any advertiser doing hands-on-keyboard work must develop a solid understanding of the structure in place so that new campaigns don’t disrupt the existing logic. Complex structures tend to be more fragile; they’re easier to break and harder to fix when they do. Adopting appropriate SOPs for new campaign launches and developing the right monitoring mechanisms can help mitigate some of the risks that complexity creates.

4. Conversion volume is critical. Conversion volume is the lifeblood of algorithmic bidding. An advertiser could develop the perfect campaign logic for their particular goals and adopt procedures that ensure effective execution, but if the conversions aren’t there, then better performance might be achieved through a simpler campaign structure. The targeting strategies above are largely the purview of advertisers with larger budgets and longer account history; for everyone else, leveraging audiences in “Observation” might be the best that can be done for now, though it can lay the groundwork for more complex applications as additional scale is achieved.

Conclusion

Gaining a better understanding of how audience targeting functions within paid search enables advertisers to vet advanced strategies that provide increased control and transparency. While not appropriate to every advertiser, these strategies can offer significant benefits – especially concerning efficiency and profitability – for those with the necessary resources for successful execution.

About the Author
Daniel Pietrucha is the owner of 174 bpm, a performance marketing consultancy focused on paid search advertising. He has over a decade of experience in digital marketing on both the agency and client sides, working for companies like Orvis, The Pro’s Closet, and Pure Hockey, as well as early-stage DTC companies in the e-commerce space.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Nataly Huff

Is your marketing team finding itself in the background, relegated to executing last-minute requests rather than shaping strategic growth? Your organization has a solid product offering and is tapping into the right market. Now is the time to scale; but somehow the crucial discussions around strategic growth happen without marketing.

So, how do we fix this? Let’s dive into the journey of transforming marketing teams from mere executers to driving forces of unprecedented insights and step-change initiatives.

Overcoming the Afterthought Syndrome

The Plight of the Overlooked Marketing Team

The path to becoming an overlooked marketing team seems to be pretty consistent across organizations.

Step 1: The company is growing, budgets are tight, and everyone seems to be “building the plane as we’re flying.” Everyone’s handling the next thing right in front of them, and no one has had a chance to think about what is foundationally needed for scale. Thinking long-term feels like a luxury.

Step 2: The founders define your products and your ideal customer’s needs, and marketing polishes the message. So the work that marketing delivers looks to be just the execution of direction and ideas that came from the leadership team.

Step 3: Marketing seems to be supporting everyone. We’re updating pitch decks, designing new case studies, and posting on social and blogs about the latest product updates. Marketing resources are spread thin and don’t seem capable of contributing at the strategy level.

Step 4: Early success with the current setup raises the fallacy of “we’ve gotten this far without having to worry about marketing strategy.”

Just four steps and the marketing team gets relegated to being a request-taker. “Can you just quickly update the design for trade show collateral? The event is this weekend, but it shouldn’t be that hard, right?” Inevitably, no one takes the time to ask who will be at the event, what the goals are, and how attendees will receive this collateral.

Bridging the Gap From Afterthought to Growth Driver

There’s a persistent myth that marketing is just about crafting ads or collateral and posting on social media. Amidst reactive, execution tasks, marketing teams face the constant struggle of proving their strategic value. Transitioning from an afterthought to a growth driver will need a substantial shift in both perception and action.
As marketers, we know that insights into market trends and customer behaviors enable better decision-making. We can see how automation will save time and improve retention and repurchase rates. We understand that managing brand reputation will make lead generation and conversion more efficient. But to sell these ideas within an organization means going beyond traditional advertising and aligning with the company’s broader objectives.

Strategic Marketing: What It Is & What It’s Not

Strategic marketing is not just a series of tactics. It’s a proactive, comprehensive approach that defines the marketing efforts based on the company’s long-term goals. It requires a thorough understanding of your market segment to inform the effective positioning of your brand. It brings a long-term view of the customer journey to build a connection with customers that goes beyond transactions. Through research and careful planning, strategic marketing interweaves the business’s objectives and the customer’s needs.

Being proactive vs reactive means intentionally selecting to put resources into the most impactful initiatives, aligning on the objectives, and defining success metrics ahead of time. And requiring intention and data-driven reasons to veer away from the plan.

Being integrated vs isolated means communicating early and often, welcoming probing questions, and focusing on the results that are meaningful for the whole organization.
Strategic marketing isn’t just about being creative; it’s about being deliberate, data-driven, and results-oriented.

Aligning Strategic Marketing with Business Goals

Strategic marketing is the backbone of any thriving business. It is the bridge between aspirations and market realities. By deeply understanding the customer and focusing on the entire customer journey, strategic marketing will increase market share, enhance customer loyalty, and drive entry into new markets.

Herein lies the first step for the transformation: we are not here to make marketing successful. We are here to make the business successful. Our goal is to make sure that every marketing message and initiative not only communicates the brand’s narrative but also drives toward specific business KPIs (key performance indicators).

Shifting Mindsets: Adopting a CEO Mindset

Moving a marketing team from the periphery to the core of business strategy has little to do with recognition. This kind of transformation comes from within the marketing team. It begins with cultivating a deep understanding of the business model, the industry landscape, and the customer base. The entire marketing team must evolve to think like business strategists. We need to do more than just use data and analytics to inform marketing decisions and measure the impact. The focus of the entire team needs to shift from making marketing successful to making the business successful. “How will this drive the business forward?” is the new marketing mantra.

Integrating Business Objectives with Marketing Initiatives

Encourage your team to, quite literally, draw the connection from their efforts to the business goal, and define every team, variable, and risk along the way.

If the line to the business goal is not clear it could mean that the priorities need to be revisited, or it could mean that the team needs a better understanding of how the business works. Both are crucial findings that help define the next step to level up strategic marketing.

If the line is drawn and dependencies defined, we now have a list of teams and processes required to ensure the success of the initiative.

The CEO mindset demands we erase “not my problem” from our vocabulary. We don’t have the luxury of saying that marketing delivered on their part, and the other teams dropped the ball. Our initiatives aren’t successful if they aren’t impacting the business goal. Bringing other functions on board, equipping them for success, and mitigating risks are squarely within the scope for which we’re accountable.

Likely, this means taking on fewer initiatives. By taking ownership of the holistic perspective of the initiative, we can now ensure that every campaign, content piece, and marketing effort is delivering tangible business outcomes. And now, every marketing dollar spent is an investment towards the company’s growth.

Truly Understanding the Business Landscape

As marketers, we need to make a habit of being very familiar with the company’s financial goals, market positioning, and product margins. Staying on top of industry trends, regulatory changes, and technological advancements that can impact the business is a requirement for any sort of forward-thinking planning. Deep knowledge of the customer journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond, is essential to identifying opportunities and ensuring connecting tactics to business results.

This comprehensive view is a base-level requirement for crafting strategies that deliver results. In building a habit of having full context, we bring strategic thinking into our efforts.

This evolution is not easy, especially when the team has been embedded in the execution tasks for so long. Your teams might not know how to break out of the status quo. Sometimes, a transformation requires some external support with a fresh perspective. Bringing in a team coach, or a fractional leader to help facilitate the transition can make a big difference and accelerate the process.

Why Before How: Focus on Driving Results

When it comes to humans, perception is formed quickly and will influence actions immediately. This means that unless we quickly, clearly, consistently, and repeatedly communicate why something matters – most people will not care.

We cannot assume that everyone has the same context, or even has time to think about the context. We cannot assume that people understand what we’re trying to accomplish and how our initiative impacts the business. Unless we spell out how our work benefits the company, many might assume that we have not thought it through.

We need to take every opportunity to talk about the “why” in quantifiable, tangible results that matter all.

Obsessive Outcome-Oriented Approach

Part of the transition is pivoting from being activity-focused to outcome-driven. Before diving into the ‘how’ of tactics and campaigns, we must first clarify the ‘why’ – the goal outcomes and objectives. How will we know we succeeded? How will that success impact the strategic goals of the company? Every marketer should be able to easily answer these questions.

Knowing the “why” will help prioritize work, evaluate effort vs impact, and make internal communications easier. This results-obsessed approach will give credibility to both our initiatives and our accomplishments. Communicating the targets will bring people in on the process and show intentionality behind our efforts. We are no longer viewed as throwing spaghetti at the wall or “just doing some last-minute updates.” We are setting out to drive the company forward and explain how. And we are promising to hold ourselves accountable to the results we targeted.

And now that we’ve set this standard for ourselves, we have a basis to ask probing questions (with positive intent) of other teams. The goal here is not to show off or make our peers look bad. We are here to help stimulate the conversation and demonstrate strategic capability to bring value into any conversation.

Identifying Which Results Matter

We are no longer looking to make marketing succeed, we are working for the business to succeed. Now, we have to find the KPIs that align with business objectives. So that anyone from any team can understand how that KPI connects to the business results, without a need for us to explain.

The metrics that matter are those that are much closer to the actual desired outcome. Impression-share and clicks are not going to cut it. MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and costs per lead get closer. But in the end, it’s the actual conversions that matter. These KPIs will be the guiding light toward high-impact activities. When we take ownership of the full-funnel performance of our initiatives (even when they include activities not owned by marketing), we are forcing ourselves to care and get involved with all elements that impact company growth.

Results that the entire organization can get behind make it easier to talk about the targets and the outcomes. When we can start demonstrating how marketing strategies contribute to the bigger picture, it will help validate the role of marketing. It will also encourage a more result-driven culture.

This Transformation is Hard

Without Marketing at the executive table, scale is likely to become a challenge. Strategic marketing leadership ensures that the path to scale becomes clearer, the efforts more concerted, and the outcomes more impactful. Embracing marketing as a central driver of growth is not just smart – it’s essential for any company looking to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

What’s Needed to Make It Happen

You will need marketing leaders who can step up to spearhead discussions, integrate into business strategy, build relationships, and pioneer a results-driven culture. This calls for senior marketers who are not just creative thinkers but also savvy business strategists. Someone who possesses a blend of marketing acumen and a deep understanding of business operations. The current teams are likely to have carved a deep path within the status quo, and breaking free from those legacy processes will take time, effort, and initiative.

Change like this needs a catalyst and a champion. It is a job for a seasoned professional that is hard to find and is likely expensive. For this transformation, the concept of fractional marketing leadership can be a game-changer.

By hiring a seasoned marketing executive on a part-time or contract basis, companies can access top-tier marketing expertise without the full-time financial commitment. These experienced professionals bring a wealth of experience, strategic insight, and leadership. All the skills businesses need but may not be able to afford full-time. A fractional CMO can bring credibility and external perspective to help shape and implement a marketing strategy that drives growth. They can mentor existing teams, introduce best practices, and establish a results-driven marketing culture. For companies looking to scale, a fractional marketing executive can be the best way to get the strategic direction needed to navigate the complexities of market expansion and customer acquisition.

About the Author
Nataly Huff is an experienced leader known for challenging the status quo and creating measurable, sustainable change. With more than 15 years in leadership focusing on growth and retention marketing, Nataly has a proven track record of driving growth for startups and mature global organizations alike.

The foundation of her career stems from agency-side work for clients in Health, Science, and Technology. As her career evolved, Nataly took on transformational and ground-up development of world-class teams in EdTech, Retail, and Prosumer SaaS. Today, Nataly is the Founder & CEO of Innovate Forward Marketing (https://www.innovate-fwd.com/) offering strategic guidance and practical marketing expertise to businesses worldwide.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Amanda Berg
This article was originally published in Amanda’s email newsletter, Growth Therapy.  

If you asked any paid media buyer how to run Facebook ads in 2017, they’d give you a completely different answer than if you asked that same question today (and if they don’t, run!).

Facebook used to be THE channel for ultra-precise, narrowed-in targeting, which, of course, made it an incredibly valuable tool for advertisers looking to reach highly relevant audiences.

But a lot has changed in the last ~7 years. Aside from the fact that we call Facebook “Meta” now, precise, advertiser-controlled audience targeting is no longer a key feature of the platform. Like most of the big paid digital channels, Meta has removed more and more advertiser control over time, relying more on its modeling and algorithms to serve ads to the right people at the right time.

AI and ML advancements aside, there were a few key turning points that led to sweeping changes in how advertising on Facebook works.

Let’s dive into how it used to work, what these turning points were, and how it works now, so you can leverage Meta properly — and not like it’s 2017.

How Facebook Targeting Used to Work

Back in the day, you could target your Facebook ads to virtually any granular subset of people you could dream up, based on demographic info, interests, and behaviors. This included:

See this (massive) graphic from 2018 that details all the possible targeting options on Facebook. Keep in mind that each of these interest categories contains thousands of individual interests.

This level of targeting was incredibly useful to all advertisers and made it easier than ever to reach new and high-intent users at a massive scale.

For example, think about how a nascent clean beauty brand, political campaign team, or consumer fintech company could all use the same tools on Facebook to achieve massive reach to their precise audience.

But if you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, it must have been easy for Facebook and its advertisers to abuse all this information,” you’re already ahead of where Facebook was (publicly, at least) at the time.

The Audience Insights Tool

If you remember the old audience insights tool, you might not even know there’s still a version of it currently available because it’s so watered down.

The old version of Facebook’s audience insights tool was an absolute goldmine. Facebook used to let you pop in ANY targeting inputs you’d like, and would spit out the demographics and interests of those folks so that you could:

Luckily, I was able to find a screenshot of what this tool used to look like (apologies for the blurry image). You entered your inputs into the gray menu on the left, and could then learn all about this audience on the right:

Facebook Audience Insights Tool

The real golden nuggets came from the “Page Likes” tab, where you could see a list of pages liked by your audience. You could then target these as interests.

There’s still a version of this tool that exists, but it’s so watered down that I don’t see how it’s useful. The inputs are much more limited, to age, gender, location, and a limited set of interests.

When I tested it, the outputs were virtually the same across the various demographics I tried, and were incredibly generic, as you can see in the list below.

Facebook Top Pages Example

This is the “top pages” list for my demographic, Women 26 – 34 in Colorado. Aside from the Denver Broncos (and the total wildcard that is Eminem 🍝), the same “interests” showed up in virtually every demographic breakout I tried.

Custom Audiences and Lookalikes

Custom and lookalike audience lists have also gone through a lot of change, though not nearly as visibly.

They certainly still exist and are widely used, but they’re not as powerful as they used to be, particularly for smaller brands with less reach. To understand why that is, it’s important to note the two most common ways of building a custom audience:

Once you build a custom audience this way, you can then tell Facebook to make you a net new audience of people that “look like” the folks in your seed list. Facebook’s ability to do this accurately relies on being able to take your seed list and match it up with folks on Facebook.

Match rates used to sit in the 60% – 80% range. The missing 20% – 40% wasn’t a deficiency in Facebook’s ability to understand your data — more often than not, you just had folks in your list that either didn’t use Facebook or used Facebook with different contact info.

You can see why having a large audience is necessary to inform Facebook’s ability to model, even when match rates used to be this high. Today, match rates are much lower. I’ll explain why.

The Two Major Turning Points

Two key events over the last 10 years meaningfully changed the way Facebook functions as an ad platform. The first takes us back to 2014…

1. The Cambridge Analytica Scandal

This story made global news in 2018, so you may remember pieces of it. Here’s the TL;DR:

Back in 2014, a developer and academic named Aleksandr Kogan released a Facebook app called “thisisyourdigitalife” and billed it as a personality test. Around 270,000 Facebook users downloaded the app and consented to share their data with the app itself.  Behind the scenes, the developer was sharing all this data with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica — without users’ consent — a violation of Facebook’s policy.  Further, Facebook’s API at the time allowed developers to access information about people’s Facebook friends, so the data of around 50 million people, unbeknownst to them, was ultimately shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica then used this data to build psychographic profiles of users that could be used to target political ads with extreme precision. A whistleblower finally leaked the story, and Facebook had to pay the price by significantly tightening up its rules around:

We started seeing many granular interest and behavior-targeting segments disappear from Facebook as a direct result. To this day Facebook still occasionally removes targeting options, often blaming the fact that they’re “duplicative” or “rarely used.” You certainly can’t find anything related to race, religion, or political affiliation anymore, and tons of interest segments have been removed over time.

2. Apple’s iOS 14.5 Rollout

The second key turning point made big headlines in the digital marketing and tech circles but may have flown under the radar for Gen Pop. This was Apple’s rollout of iOS 14.5 in the spring of 2021.

The key change in this OS update was that all apps would be required to show a one-time popup to all users, asking them to opt into being tracked by that app. If a user opted out, they could not be asked again to opt in.

This was annoying for app developers, but not the end of the world for most apps. And it was such a non-event for typical consumers that you probably don’t even remember this happening. Meta, however, was uniquely positioned to lose out big time — Facebook and Instagram are both mobile apps AND massive advertising platforms that rely heavily on tracking user behavior to properly inform their ad-serving algorithms.

It’s estimated that as many as 90% of people opted out of being tracked — a massive loss for Meta.

In other words, up to 90% of the portion of your audience that uses an Apple device is no longer trackable or able to be used in custom or lookalike audiences. If your audience happens to skew heavily Android or desktop, this has less of an impact on you.

Let’s bring this back to custom audience match rates. As a result of users being given the power to opt out of being tracked by Facebook and Instagram, match rates have sharply declined, and typically come in around 25% – 40% these days. This means Facebook has far fewer data points to power its models, and means it’s especially challenging for smaller or newer orgs with less data to leverage these tools.

This opt-out behavior also impacts the interest and behavior targeting options that remain, accurate conversion tracking, and anything else on Meta that relies on engagement and conversion signal — think budget optimization and creative optimization.

The Key Changes

Of course, it’s good for consumers not to have their data shared or tracked without their consent. Ultimately, the two major impacts on advertisers from these events were:

How Meta Targeting Works Now

For better or worse, Meta is heavily invested in AI and machine learning, which are more crucial than ever in both measuring performance and powering its ad-serving algorithm. Since many granular targeting options have been done away with, Meta now encourages advertisers to use what they call “Advantage+ targeting”, a silly name that means you’re letting Meta decide for you who to show ads to, and when and where to place them.

One huge misconception here is that by going “broad” this way, your targeting is fully open. Unless you’re optimizing purely for reach, it’s virtually impossible to have “open targeting” on Meta, because their algorithms have gotten so good at honing in on who to serve ads to. Advertisers just don’t have as much visibility into who their ads are being served to as they used to, back when they could make more of these decisions themselves.

It’s also more difficult now to achieve ultra-precise geographical targeting. According to Meta’s documentation:

“Meta technologies use a variety of signals to show ads to the people who are a part of your location targeting selections. Because these signals vary, complete accuracy cannot be guaranteed. You may occasionally see a small number of ad impressions, or even receive a message or lead, from outside of your location settings.”

Finally, when using custom or lookalike audiences, know that bigger is better. Consensus on exact numbers varies, but I like to use 10,000 matched profiles as an absolute minimum — meaning you probably need somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 profiles in your list, depending on what your match rate looks like.

When you bear in mind that a 1% lookalike audience in the U.S. contains somewhere between 2 and 3 million people, basing that list off of just 10,000 profiles means Meta still has to fill in a lot of blanks.

These numbers probably sound like small potatoes for medium and large brands, but this can be difficult to achieve for newer, smaller, or budget-constrained brands.

Does This Mean Meta Ads Don’t Work As Well Anymore?

I would say different, not worse. Meta is still a critical channel for B2C brands that are focused on acquisition, and it’s an incredibly powerful platform, in part because of how it’s needed to adapt over time and leverage machine learning.

It’s certainly gotten harder for very small or very local brands, because of all of the changes we discussed. CPMs have also gotten a lot more expensive over time as competition has increased and advertiser controls have lessened.

How to Use the “New” Meta Ads to Your Advantage

For starters, you don’t have to worry about as many campaign settings anymore. Unless your targeting needs to be restrictive, you should minimize your targeting parameters and let Meta figure most of it out for you. Its machine-learning algorithm is just going to be better than a human’s assumptions at determining what audience you should reach, especially with so many interests and other targeting options removed.

This isn’t to say you don’t need to understand who your audience is because Meta will understand it for you — quite the opposite.

Secondly, and I’ve talked about this before, your creative is now your targeting. It’s now the job of your creative assets to grab the attention of the people you want to reach with the right visuals and messaging to do so. A deep understanding of your customers and what makes them tick is essential to doing this well.

Invest in getting to know your customers — get on the phone with them, read the reviews they’re leaving, put thought into your post-purchase surveys, etc.

About the Author
Amanda Berg is a fractional head of growth and writer of the Growth Therapy Newsletter. She works with early-stage B2C startups to strategically launch, hone, and scale their marketing functions to effectively drive key outcomes. Previously, she led growth teams in-house at companies like SmartAsset and Zola. She’s based in Denver, CO.

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.

RevelOne’s Spotlight Series regularly features insights from top experts in our Interim Expert Network. We cover a broad range of topics at the intersection of marketing, growth, and talent. If you’re interested in exploring these topics further and engaging with one of our 200+ executive or mid-level experts, please contact our team at experts@revel-one.com.

Written by Loretta Doria

Gone are the days when CMOs spent their time solely buried in strategy decks and spreadsheets. Today’s CMOs are tasked with driving tangible and measurable progress toward business objectives, and they need to do it quickly. This demands not only strategic vision but also a keen understanding of how each marketing channel operates and how to assemble teams to effectively manage these channels.

Enter email – the unsung hero of marketing. Despite being declared dead and back to life more times than Elvis, email marketing continues to survive and thrive. Here are five reasons why it remains an indispensable tool:

1. Email is the Perfect Canvas for Your Brand’s Story
Email provides a unique opportunity to tell your brand’s story in a personalized and engaging way. It’s not exactly long-form, it’s not quite short-form either – which perfectly positions it to engage creatively, entertain, educate (or both!) with content, while also driving to a clear call to action or point of conversion. Whether showcasing new products, sharing customer success stories, or delivering exclusive content, email allows you to create a narrative that reinforces your brand identity and drives toward those KPIs.

2. Email is a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Neutralizing Channel
Unlike other marketing channels that may require significant investment to acquire new customers, email marketing can be a cost-effective way to engage with your existing audience and nurture relationships over time. In fact, according to Litmus, email generates $42 for every $1 spent – that’s a 4,200% ROI. By leveraging your email list, you can reach out to potential customers who have already shown interest in your brand, making it a highly targeted and efficient channel for driving conversions. It’s also a low-cost channel for testing messaging to understand what resonates the most.

3. Email is Your Gateway to Retention
While acquiring new customers is essential for growth, retaining existing customers is what makes ‘forever brands’. Email marketing plays a crucial role in nurturing customer relationships and fostering loyalty. From engaging newsletters and personalized promotions and loyalty rewards to post-purchase follow-ups and customer feedback surveys, email allows you to stay top of mind with your audience throughout their journey, increasing the likelihood of repeat business and referrals.

4. Email Can Be Automated
One of the most significant advantages of email marketing is its ability to be automated. And what’s even better is there are many marketer-friendly email service providers (like Klaviyo, Iterable, and Sendlane to name a few) that put automation within reach even without a team of full-stack engineers. All stages of businesses can benefit from automated campaigns based on specific actions or behaviors, such as welcome emails for new subscribers, abandoned cart reminders, or re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers. And once your list is growing at a fast clip, testing in your triggered program can squeeze significant gains out of your list. Automation saves time and resources and ensures timely and relevant communication with your audience.

5. Email is Highly Visible!
Your boss sees it, your boss’s boss sees it, and beyond. If you don’t agree, try sending your CEO an email with a typo in the subject line or a broken link and see how quickly you get feedback! Email is a highly visible channel that frequently catches the eye of senior leadership and can even contribute to building culture within your organization. An email sent to customers often represents the collective effort of many team members, so make your team proud by sending only exceptional emails.

How to Assess the State of Your Current Email Program
Before diving into any changes or improvements, it’s essential to evaluate the effectiveness of your current email program as a whole. It’s easy to get caught up in reacting to one-off ideas and feedback, but this approach generally won’t move the needle in a way that satisfies all stakeholders.

Annual comprehensive audits of your email content, design, segmentation strategies, and automation workflows are crucial. This involves analyzing key metrics such as audience growth, click-through rates, conversion rates, revenue, and subscriber engagement compared to industry benchmarks, as well as your historical performance and the relative performance of other channels.

Additionally, consider seeking the expertise of fractional experts. They are a valuable resource for fresh perspectives that cut through clutter and internal bias to prioritize impact more efficiently.

Building Your Organization Around Retention
Building or restructuring your organization around retention requires a holistic approach that involves cross-functional collaboration and alignment. Start by identifying key stakeholders from various departments, including marketing, customer service, product development, and data analytics.

Collaborate on developing a unified retention strategy that prioritizes customer experience, personalization, continuous improvement, and most importantly, aligns on goals and success measures. Then, invest in the necessary resources, technology, and talent to execute your retention initiatives effectively, and regularly monitor and measure the impact of your efforts to ensure ongoing success. Communication is key – retention metrics don’t change overnight, so keeping teams apprised of learnings and progress is critical to maintaining momentum.

By recognizing the power and potential of email marketing, CMOs can strengthen their connection to the customer and drive measurable growth!

About the Author
Loretta Doria is a fractional head of marketing with extensive CRM expertise, focusing on early-stage high-growth businesses in e-commerce, fashion, beauty, health, and wellness, among other sectors. With a track record of working with category-defining brands like Birchbox, Pura Vida Bracelets, Function of Beauty, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Doubleday, she has been called “startup whisperer” and “chief cat herder.”

About RevelOne
RevelOne is a leading go-to-market advisory and recruiting firm. We help hundreds of VC/PE-backed companies each year leverage the right resources to achieve more profitable growth. We do 250+ retained searches a year in Marketing and Sales roles from C-level on down for some of the most recognized names in tech. In addition to our Search Practice, our Interim Expert Network includes 200+ vetted expert contractors – executive-level leaders and head-of/director-level functional experts – available for interim or fractional engagements. For help in any of these areas, contact us.