eCommerce Australia
Power of Systematised Creative in eCommerce - Ben Fitzpatrick (Webprofits)
Ever wondered how to skyrocket your e-commerce business while maintaining a healthy profit margin?
Ryan Martin, Host of eCommerce Australia and Founder of Remarkable Digital, speaks with Ben Fitzpatrick, Chief Strategy Officer at WebProfits, as he shares his vast expertise and unique journey—from Washington, DC to Southeast Asia, and now the Central Coast of New South Wales.
Ben's transformation from an SEO and content expert to a key leader sheds light on the dynamic roles within the agency world, emphasising the necessity of staying connected with clients and maintaining a hands-on approach.
Discover the intricacies of scaling product profitability, particularly through the nuanced landscape of Meta ads.
Ben dives into the essential strategies of maintaining profitable unit economics, mastering low customer acquisition costs, and leveraging customer insights for impactful marketing strategies.
He shares his experience with different ad creatives, contrasting the effectiveness of polished ads versus raw, TikTok-style UGC to create and capture demand effectively.
Learn how to focus on building a customer base that not only thrives now but is primed for future promotions and growth.
Hear firsthand how small businesses can break through in a crowded market by employing solid foundational strategies and staying closely connected to their customers.
Download our Ultimate eCommerce Checklist to improve your eCommerce results.
Join 'A Remarkable Newsletter' for weekly high performance marketing and content actionable tips.
Ever wondered how to skyrocket your e-commerce business while maintaining a healthy profit margin?
Ryan Martin, Host of eCommerce Australia and Founder of Remarkable Digital, speaks with Ben Fitzpatrick, Chief Strategy Officer at WebProfits, as he shares his vast expertise and unique journey—from Washington, DC to Southeast Asia, and now the Central Coast of New South Wales.
Ben's transformation from an SEO and content expert to a key leader sheds light on the dynamic roles within the agency world, emphasising the necessity of staying connected with clients and maintaining a hands-on approach.
Discover the intricacies of scaling product profitability, particularly through the nuanced landscape of Meta ads.
Ben dives into the essential strategies of maintaining profitable unit economics, mastering low customer acquisition costs, and leveraging customer insights for impactful marketing strategies.
He shares his experience with different ad creatives, contrasting the effectiveness of polished ads versus raw, TikTok-style UGC to create and capture demand effectively.
Learn how to focus on building a customer base that not only thrives now but is primed for future promotions and growth.
Hear firsthand how small businesses can break through in a crowded market by employing solid foundational strategies and staying closely connected to their customers.
Download our Ultimate eCommerce Checklist to improve your eCommerce results.
Join 'A Remarkable Newsletter' for weekly high performance marketing and content actionable tips.
Welcome to the Ecommerce Australia podcast. For those of you seeking direct assistance, remarkable Digital is just a call away. Our mission is to be remarkable, doing great things for great people and great businesses. I understand how much choice you have and how many podcasts are out there, so I'm truly grateful you've tuned in. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or topics you'd like covered. Let's get started. Welcome to eCommerce Australia. As usual, we have an absolutely bloody fantastic guest on the show today. He's currently in the role of Chief Strategy Officer at WebProfits after starting in an SEO and content role there 11 years ago, so I'm sure he's seen some things that we can chat about. Really looking forward to this discussion, as Ben has had so much experience across many different eCommerce brands over the years. So a big welcome to eComcommerce Australia, ben Fitzpatrick Awesome.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Ryan.
Speaker 1:I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, looking forward to picking your brain Actually, I hate that phrase, picking your brain Looking forward to having a bit of a deep dive into how things are going at WebProfits. And obviously you guys have made a shift over the last few years to e-commerce and D2C brands, so it'd be good to sort of see what's working and get our listening audience to perhaps have some really good takeaways and some good things to think about by the end of this podcast. So before we get into the e-commerce, I always like to learn a little bit more about our guests. So you're based in New South Wales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just up on the, the central coast north of sydney. Uh, we made the move about a year and a half ago to get some more space. I get out of the city and uh, yeah, just uh, settling here with the family nice, have you taken up?
Speaker 1:surfing is a good surf culture on the central coast or?
Speaker 2:I'm a baseball guy, so I found a baseball team here in sydney and that that's my sport. I don't really have the headspace for more than that, so I just stick with my one. But yeah, otherwise just kind of hang out at the beach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good, and I'll get on to what your weekends typically look like, but the astute listeners will notice a bit of a US accent there. Where did you grow up in the US and then where did you sort of head out to Australia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I grew up in Washington, the US, and then when did you sort of head out to Australia? Yeah, so I grew up in Washington DC and basically after the GFC kind of took off, I had a job as a contractor for cable news shows like CNN. I lived across Southeast Asia for a few years until I met my wife, who's Australian. We were both living in the same town in Cambodia and she then moved back to Australia and I followed her here. So I was just lucky enough to make it to Australia by chance and have been here and loving it ever since.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Was it what you thought? Did you think like many Americans?
Speaker 2:I expected to get off the plane and there'd be kangaroos in the vicinity of the terminal basically. So that's my especially. If you talk to some of the Australians living in Southeast Asia, they'll certainly take you on a nice journey there with the drop bears and all, there's a few old stories that we like to run with for a bit of a laugh.
Speaker 1:But nice and your partner, was she originally Central Coast? Is that where she grew up?
Speaker 2:No, she's Northern Beaches. So it took me about 10 years to convince her to move away from the Northern Beaches, but eventually we got there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice. And what's a typical weekend, mate? You mentioned you've got a couple of young kids, so is it sort of chasing around them or what's a typical weekend? I mean right now?
Speaker 2:a typical weekend is just birthday parties, like. I feel like that's all I do right now is go from one birthday party to another, but we also I mean, we're lucky enough to be just about an hour from the Hunter Valley, so we'll head up there. Sometimes it's a pretty nice spot to get around some of the more kind of rural areas outside of Sydney.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fantastic, Beautiful mate. Well, let's get into some e-commerce chat, shall we? So, yeah, you've obviously started with WebProfits in an SEO and content role, as I mentioned, and now you're Chief Strategy Officer. What does a Chief Strategy Officer do? It's a fair question.
Speaker 2:Previously I was doing a lot of strategy development in this role and actually that's evolved quite a bit.
Speaker 2:But I think the main role of chief strategy officer is to ensure, first and foremost, that our services are what we need to deliver against the goals for our clients.
Speaker 2:So within the e-commerce space, this is increasingly having a really strong playbook that we can bring to any business that we can activate against to grow them. So that's where I was saying I kind of used to do a lot of strategy development projects with a business. Now this role is much more so about making sure that we have the right approach across the board, that we have the right creative asset development process, scaling process, creative asset development process, scaling process, how we're approaching our email and customer lifecycle market all of these pieces that we have what we need to perform there and then being able to deliver that across our client portfolio. I also lead a number of our bigger accounts, so at WebProfits we just kind of never move off the tools. It's always important that everyone in the company is connected to businesses that we partner with and that kind of keeps us grounded. I've been in a short role at WebProfits where I wasn't client-facing and have found that that doesn't work for me and it doesn't work in agency that well in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting, I couldn't agree more with that actually. Yeah, interesting, I couldn't agree more with that actually. I think once you move away from dealing directly with the clients, you lose that edge, you lose that sharpness of what is actually working and if you're more of a sales role, you still need to be across what's working and what's not. I mean, I do a lot of sales as well.
Speaker 2:The other thing is you forget how hard it is, so you tell businesses, yeah, we can do this, yeah, we can do that, without having the real deep understanding of how hard that's going to be, what's going to be involved in achieving that, and I think, increasingly, you're not going to make the sale unless people believe that. You know how hard it is, because everybody knows how hard it is, and so that's the part where we struggled with sales for a few years, trying to bridge that gap right there, because it just had to be our top performers that can go in and say this is what you should do. That's always a tough balance, but it's definitely a place where I spend a lot of my time as well, for sure, yeah, yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1:So that's a great kind of, I guess, lead or segue into the next question around. You know you speak, you're in a lot of sales meetings, but you're also in a lot of strategy meetings and execution meetings around that. So what's the biggest issue you've come across for e-commerce brands, particularly in the last 12 months?
Speaker 2:So I thought a lot about this because I assume we would talk to a question like this. I couldn't get it down below three. So I mean anyone in e-commerce who doesn't say that scaling creative isn't the hardest thing that we're trying to do right now isn't doing it right, like the scaling creative, and scaling creative asset development in particular is just extraordinarily. It's just really hard, and the reason for this is that I mean I should just take a step back and say that the e-commerce that WebProfits focuses on is scaling, and there's a difference between kind of growth and scaling. So we're generally working with businesses that will have a pretty significant goal that they're trying to achieve in the year ahead, and the expectation is that we're going to come in and drive pretty rapid growth. It's not going to take off right away, but that's certainly what we're working towards, and so, within that type of framework, creative asset development needs to be able to scale up with that process as well. And I think this is the thing that I often find marketers fall down on. Is they figure out an approach to make one great ad and then two weeks later, that ad is already, you know, out of the picture. I mean, that's not exactly how it works, but like it needs to be a process, a system that can grow with your business growth and, at the same time, continue to deliver exceptional content. And you know, just to break through on meta, and you know really meta in particular is so hard right now, with all the brands so heavily invested, that the content just needs to be at that level.
Speaker 2:And what I find that businesses still are stuck doing is that they're not making ads. They're still kind of briefing influencers. I call it brief and pray, where you kind of brief an influencer and say you know and can you also? You know, give us a few of these shots and maybe answer a few of these questions, send it to us and then we're going to stitch it together into something that we can get to perform Like.
Speaker 2:I work with a lot of businesses that are still in kind of that framework. It's often driven by their PR or their comms, whereas like to perform in e-commerce. Right now you need to make ads, you need to make great ads and there's a system behind it. You need to really be testing all your hooks and your end frames and all the different elements across the whole ad to actually know what's performing, and I think there's just such a big gap between what most businesses are doing right now and actually what is required to succeed. That's the first one. The second one, very quickly, because I know I'm rambling on a bit. No, you're right.
Speaker 2:I've got some questions, but keep going, I think attribution is in a different place than a couple of years ago, I think a couple of years ago. Everyone's talking iOS. We're losing visibility. I'm of the opposite opinion. I think right now we're in a golden age of data.
Speaker 2:In e-commerce, we have access to just unbelievable data. I mean, we use Triple Whale as our kind of attribution tool for our e-commerce brands and I don't know if you've worked in performance marketing for more than five years. Having a tool that you can log into and see your meta ads, your Google ads, your e-commerce performance, you know, your website analytics all in one place and like single source of truth is it's life changing? Like I it is. Uh, it is really fundamentally different from the way that we were able to work with data, even a few years ago. The hard part is how to make good decisions with that, because now we're starting to get different attribution models giving us different answers. Your meta ads are achieving a four or five ROAS in platform, but when you go into Triple Whale and you actually look at the product performance, it's like a blended 1.5 ROAS or something like that. It's like, okay. Well, now we need to figure out how do we make good decisions and I think that that is changing pretty fast right now, and keeping up with that is a real struggle, because making those decisions is one of the key elements of scaling. It's all about incremental improvement on that evergreen marketing that we're activated against.
Speaker 2:And then the last one, I guess, is product focus, and I think this should be always one of the things that any e-commerce marketer is really heavily spending more time on than a lot of us are. One of the things that I find is the decision on what products to focus on within e-commerce is often the first decision. It's made relatively quickly and actually impacts everything from that point on. If you focus on the wrong product, then no matter. You can deliver the absolute best content, creative ads, all of this and you're just never going to get there. And I feel like that decision right there is one that doesn't get enough time and conversation from the performance marketers before that investment goes in. And so making decisions around products, especially when we're dealing with brands that have quite a lot of products, there's a real opportunity, but also one we're struggling with as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant mate. That's the whole podcast there, I think I've got enough questions.
Speaker 2:I'm like I could list a whole bunch of other things. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1:So some questions off the back of those three, which is fantastic insights, first and foremost. Can I leave with that. Let's touch on the last point around product. So what makes a great product? In relation to that next level of context down for our listeners, when you're talking about a great product, is that making sure that their product is actually the best in market? Or what I think you're talking more about is what product is going to generate the most amount of profit or margin? What's your best seller? What's going to be the best to advertise and what are you going to lead with so you get returned customers? Is that what you mean by a great product?
Speaker 2:You've got a lot of the factors right there. First and foremost, we're looking for a product that we can scale. There are some kind of dynamics to that. Generally, it's hard to scale a product that has a price point or an average order value below 70 or $80. Like that's pretty difficult to do, at least through meta, and if we're scaling we're on meta. So there's a few dynamics there. Generally.
Speaker 2:Well, what those numbers look like will also depend on what the post-purchase customer lifecycle experience looks like. If this is a product that people are buying in a recurring basis, like a consumable product of some sort, then the model can look a bit different. If it's mattresses and they're not going to buy another one for five years, it just needs to be profitable. So, having a product that we feel like we can get those numbers right with, that's the first piece. The second piece is it will come back to what the business goals are. You know we have a client, just as an example right now, that has a huge goal for this financial or for this calendar year that we're working with them on, and so we've actually made a strategic decision to focus in the first half of the year on products that don't have as strong a ROAS but that we can bring in a really low cost per customer acquisition. Customer acquisition cost excuse me, that means we can build a big customer base in the first half of the year to then go out through our promotions, in particular Black Friday, and really try to drive that upsell to hit our revenue goals. So there is also kind of those dynamics that you need to bring into play. And then profitability right, if the unit economics don't work, it doesn't work at all, and I think a lot of businesses have been hit by this in the past where they scale on numbers that aren't profitable and then they end up in a position where they're just losing money on all the revenue that they're bringing in. That's one of the hardest things, especially for smaller e-commerce businesses that are just getting in the game, because it is so hard and competitive. You know that there needs to be either some runway there or just absolute certainty around the numbers and just, you know, not letting it go outside of that. So that's some of the dynamics.
Speaker 2:And then the last one is and this is where we spend tons of time is just insight, customer insight.
Speaker 2:You know we will interview the customer service team, export all of the customer service inquiries and run that through ChatGPT to find, you know, different insights on what people are asking about.
Speaker 2:Well, ideally we interview customers as well to actually hear directly from them around their experiences. And then my pet peeve, especially as an agency, is I always want my team to have the product, because what I've seen is when people actually have the product, they understand it in a whole different way. And even just recently we had one experience where one of my team members had a product that it's like a kitchen product white goods and they understood it in a way that they were able to scale a product that had no demand over the last two years $400 average order value and we were selling over 2000 of them a month through, basically, the insights that they had. Now you've got to work with a big brand to be able to get that kind of quick growth, but that's where those insights can really go a long way, especially with the way creative works right now. You just need to have one idea that really breaks through and then that could be a $100,000 ad right there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, brilliant. So again, another sort of nice segue into the first point you made around creative, be good to get your thoughts on. Obviously I'm more a Google guy with SEO and paid, but I'm running my own meta ads at the moment as well. But from a creative point of view, what do you see working? Is it a polished ad that looks like an ad, or do you have to work even harder to get that raw UGC look and feel? Obviously, it depends on the brand and who you're working with. But what are you seeing working? That polished thing that looks exactly like an ad but it's clean and it's on point? Or a more rough and ready shot on the iPhone? You know more TikTok UGC sort of feel? What's working for you guys?
Speaker 2:It is both. I think that's important because everyone focuses on the TikTok style UGC, which is like you're going to scale through that type of content. That's where you know you can. Generally, what I'm thinking is you know, how are we going to create demand? Capturing demand is then the you know the second piece, and a lot of that does happen as well on Google Creating demand. We really need that video creative usually to be able to kind of move the needle there.
Speaker 2:And what works right now is exactly what you're talking about, that TikTok style, very direct response actually, and just fast hooks, fast pace actually, you know. And just fast hooks, fast pace, you know, just moving from shot to shot really quickly, keeping the energy in it. You know that works really well and is essential. But the other side of it, I'm like I'm a big product ad guy. I did the marketing for Logitech globally for about five years, so I have built so many product ads over the years.
Speaker 2:It's silly and in the end, if you can't sell your product through a product ad, at least to some degree at least validate that there's demand, there's intent for this product in market. It's going to be really hard to scale it with that other creative. So I think they really do fit together and you can validate that you have something that's going to work and that's worth the investment of building out these creative assets that take quite a lot of resources. Through your more standard product ads or, depending on the brand you're working with, they may give you these kind of sizzle videos or whatever you call them, but that type of stuff it does work. It's not usually enough, but it's enough to know if you have something that you should continue to invest in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. You mentioned a couple of times around testing the hooks and testing the end frames, around the key differential between you guys and other agencies, but what you're seeing is working as well. It's just like scaling that creative with quantity and quality. How do you go about that with brands? Can you take us through how much creative you actually need to create? Obviously it depends on ad spend and daily budgets and things like that. But how do you actually get that much creative done consistently?
Speaker 2:So one of the first learnings that I've had and it probably took me too long to get as a fully focused e-commerce marketer, because I've worked in a number of different as we were saying before a number of different areas, but it's to stay product focused. So when we're thinking I mean there's, I guess when I'm looking at an e-commerce store, there's going to be your promotions, so you may have your end of financial year sale or your Black Friday sale, whatever the case may be. That's a whole set of performance marketing that needs to be built out. A lot of that's customer lifecycle. But there certainly is creative there. That's not where you're doing your kind of TikTok style creative. So there's that piece, then everything else. You stay product focused. So it really is also about how many products you want to scale, not just how much creative you need. If you want to scale, focus on one product it's a single product store. Certainly you need to start with enough that you can be getting. You can be giving the algorithm enough data, and I guess this is where to be getting. You know you can be giving the algorithm, you know enough data, and I guess this is where, to be honest, I'm sure someone on my team could give, like, probably, specific numbers. You know you need six pieces of creative when you're at a budget of 20k a month. You know per fortnight or whatever the case may be. But I would focus more on building a system that scales right. So it really is about making sure that first ad you build is built in a way that you can measure all of the pieces that you're going to need to make the decisions for the next ad. So you know, it may be that that slows you down a little bit because you need to set it up the right way, but then, once it's set up, you're able to make much quicker decisions around the next pieces of creative.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I think I just think everyone is trying to work with too many creators, whereas I'm like find someone that works and then just get them to keep, you know, pumping creative to you, you know, faster. I think there's a lot of opportunity there where right now, we generally don't work with kind of the big influencers. We're always focused on micro influencers, or really we don't even talk to them as influencers, like they're content creators that are making ads for us. Once someone is good that you see like that's hard to find, and so it's really about just doubling down and going all in on them, and I think that can go a long way to, you know, to scaling up that creative.
Speaker 2:Just for context, though, it's also about getting a lot out of every creative that you make, right. So we will have, you know, if we work with a creator, we'll have them film three hooks, have them film three you know different kind of midframes, so we'll have them film a number of different pieces so that this, that one ad, we can actually get you know five, six different variations around to be able to test. That means, if we get you know three influencer driven, you know UGC creative, we end up with a set of you know 15, 20 ads that we can be testing in market for the next, you know three, four weeks. Again, this is, you know, these are in campaigns that are spending half a million a month on meta, right.
Speaker 1:So, like there's lots of different variations of that for sure. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's a really good point around. You know, and especially if you're listening to this and you're a smaller brand you're doing $10,000 a month or $20,000 or even $50,000 a month you do need to get the absolute most out of every creative that you do. So that's a really good tip to sort of create some different hooks or some, you know, some different parts of it that you can mix and match a little bit and hustle.
Speaker 2:Like I guess that's. I mean as a performance marketer, I'm always like if there's a way that we can just hustle for this. So, just as an example, like we've got, one of our big clients right now is Ninja Kitchen who do like outdoor grills and air fryers, and I mean I film B-roll for that all the time. Right, I'll go, you know, make a smoker chicken on the outdoor grill and I'll be taking some video of it, you know, taking some pictures of it and sending that off to our creative team, because why not? Right, like that's, you know that's going to help them. And if we get 50 different you know recipes or 50 different videos of me just making food, there's lots we can do with that. So I do think it's also about just hustling for it and finding ways to make it happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant, one of the things you mentioned earlier there's a difference between growth and scaling. What is that difference? What do you mean by the difference between being in a growth phase to scaling an e-commerce business, between being in the growth phase to scaling an e-commerce business? I mean?
Speaker 2:I think for me the first I mean really what it comes down to is price position, and this is for more for the retail brands in particular. You know if you're priced in market where you know Amazon or Harvey Norman or Woolies or whatever, you know the businesses that will show up in the shopping feed. You know when people are doing the branded product search, if your pricing isn't competitive with them, then you're focused on growth. You're never going to be able to scale because people always they add a product to their cart, they go to Google, they check the prices and if something's better, they'll go buy it there. So that's actually a really it's a really helpful indicator of the strategy to take. And there's lots of great growth strategies that you know that you can drive with businesses that still can grow the direct-to-consumer e-commerce line but actually have more of an impact across overall sales. That's kind of the one piece there.
Speaker 2:And then there's businesses that just aren't ready for it and I think that's the other piece where you know to go into a scaling program. There's a ton of foundational work that just needs to be all done the right way. There's I mean there's your tech stack right. So if your tech stack isn't there, it's not going to happen. And there's the resourcing on the business's side as well to make sure that they're able to keep up with. You know, all the creative, all the the creative, all the things that need to be reviewed. So there's all those different elements that just decide whether it's going to be possible or not.
Speaker 2:I think that, for me, is generally what I see in e-commerce is if a business can scale, they want to, but most businesses are not in a position to. And then the last thing the clear distinction, then, is what are the numbers that you're scaling on? Because when you're building a scaling framework, you're scaling around the absolute minimum ROAS that is profitable, whereas if you're focused on growth, maybe you're focused much more on profit and maximizing profits. Anyway, that was probably the right answer was the last one, but there's a lot of factors that go into whether you even can scale, and that's when we get excited.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fantastic, that's a really good answer. So let's talk about how you create a strategy, given the role that you're in at WebProfits. What's a typical client? Come to you, what's their problem that they're looking to solve, and then, by the sounds of it, you look at the things that you just mentioned around scalability. Are they in a growth phase or a scale phase? Do they have the required level of, I guess, ad spend, but also automation in their business, and do they have enough layers to be able to scale? Where does that strategy come from? Obviously, you want to know what the client wants to do and you have that kind of initial conversation. But how do you form that strategy to assist them?
Speaker 2:conversation. But how do you form that strategy to assist them? So the strategy is in my opinion, e-commerce is 80 that's an arbitrary number, but around their foundations right. It is having the right foundations executed at the absolute highest level. That's what performs now. If you, when we come across a business that has that, then we really need to go in. And usually strategy then looks like a customer research project where we're trying to find insights around customers that are going to allow us to open up new audiences or find new hooks to scale, whatever the case may be.
Speaker 2:But 99% of the time businesses are not in that position or if they are, they are like a direct-to-consumer first brand that built their team internally in-house as just an e-commerce your Julys, your LSKDs, just these hero brands that are just doing everything amazing. So for everyone else, usually the approach is clear, and I think that's the thing that excites me as someone who's worked in strategy for so long is the great thing about foundations is that you don't need upfront strategy. You know what to do. It's about applying that to the business and then executing it again at the highest level. And I go on about that because, like, pretty good just doesn't work, and I think that's. That is one of the things that has transitioned through my career. Like when I started 11 years ago, you could do some dodgy one of the things that has transitioned through my career. Like when I started 11 years ago, you could do some dodgy, dodgy stuff. And I mean, you know, if this is like when meta ads for Facebook ads first launched right, like a couple ads up and you're rolling, but that's just. That's not the world we live in now. It just has to be so implemented at such a high level, and that's where a lot more of our focus is, as opposed to the strategy piece Now.
Speaker 2:I have worked in a strategy role now for five, six years and done a lot of work here, and so I've obviously thought about it. It's interesting to me that we haven't. We're now at a point where we don't even really do upfront strategy almost all the time, but it's still like my definition of strategy is strategy is the insight that drives the scope of work. So a strategy is an ongoing thing where we're trying to find some insight that allows us to put together a growth opportunity, and so that's kind of where it allows us to move strategy into something that's much more active that can actually keep up with the pace of the work that we need to deliver on within e-commerce, and that is a balance. We don't always get that right, but I also find there's no business I'm talking to right now that wants a two-month upfront strategy project. That's just not part of the agency dynamic anymore.
Speaker 2:And a few years ago, that actually was something that quite often would be the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you're spot on with that foundation work.
Speaker 1:What I'm seeing I'm interested to get your take too on is the clients that have spent the last year or two years just improving those one percenters. And the biggest key that I found interviewing so many e-commerce experts over the last six to 12 months especially the brands that are doing well are closest to their customers. They talk to their customers the most and it's fascinating when I get a new client on they don't have a strategy. The brands that are doing well are closest to their customers. They talk to their customers the most and it's fascinating when I get a new client on, they don't have a strategy, they don't have a framework to talk to their customers and you can kind of see that there's a misalignment or there's not quite a congruency with you know, I guess growth because they don't seem to be that close to their customers. It's an interesting insight that I'm picking up and and each person that I speak to on the podcast, um, you know when we talk about best practice that a really clear indicator is that how well you know your customer.
Speaker 2:So it's interesting that you kind of mentioned that as well I mean, I think one of my especially with agencies, one of my pet peeves is, like agency marketers never talk to customers. Yeah, people, they often like people even think to do it and it's such a disconnect. We know how important for it is for a business to, you know, to be engaged with their customers, to understand you know what's the feedback we're getting. I mean, you know there's so many different levels to what that should look like, but I, you know, from my perspective, unless you've got, you know, just an extraordinary brand to work with or a product that is just so well differentiated, the only way you're going to find what works is through your customers, because there's a competitor out there that has something you know, relatively similar, right Like it's going to be competitive. It is about understanding how you can add value for your customers and how do you add that really clearly communicate that value and get them bought into it. So it's not only talking to customers.
Speaker 2:I guess the one other thing I would say is every business has those one or two people that just are the kind of stores of all the knowledge. So usually, you know, it's like somebody that's been in the customer service team for seven years, has talked to thousands of customers. They know all the products backwards and forwards, something like that. I mean for small businesses, a different dynamic, but even still, someone in product development that just knows you know. Whatever the case may be, what we'll do is we'll do a long form interview with that person, get it transcribed Again. We'll be running it through ChatGPT to pull out insights, to pull out opportunities, stuff like that, because there's just so much stored knowledge within businesses right now that it's really easy to pull that out with the tools we have these days.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. That's a really, really good strategy. I might use that for my own agency. Thank you, man. What can small businesses learn from the bigger e-commerce businesses? Obviously where profits is correct me if I'm wrong but more positioned towards those bigger brands that are wanting to scale and have all their foundational work correct. Are there any commonalities that you see with the most successful big e-com businesses that a small to medium-sized e-com business could learn?
Speaker 2:from. Yeah, I mean first, I would say so we do work with quite a lot of businesses on more of a performance model, where they are in an early stage, but we see all the elements to enable them to be able to scale and we're willing to, you know. So we're willing to put a little bit more of our skin in the game to make that model work, because there's upside on the other end. So we work with a lot of small businesses or, you know, growing businesses, I would say, and the first thing I would say is like I don't think you can do this marketing well for the biggest businesses unless you're hustling, you know, on the ground, because one of the hardest things for all performance marketers is, you know what's the biggest impact on performance marketing results, brand right, and it's the one thing that we don't, you know, that we don't focus on, at least not directly. You know very much. So like the biggest factor in our results is the one thing that's out of our control. And for a small business, that's. You know it's real, you know when you're. You know I've got the newest keyboard. You know it's going to change the world, like you still got to go up against the Logitech keyboard and all the you know and everything that's built into that right. So, like, being a small business has a very different element of how you have to break through the how you have to break through. The great thing is the model is exactly the same. It's still the same type of creative. It's still the same type of validating that you can get some initial results with the products, your hero products, that you think is going to have the biggest impact getting those numbers right. Once you see those initial results, go out and create and develop these creative assets, start to move them in market, find what works, iterate creative assets. Start to move them in market. Find what works, iterate and rinse and repeat. So I think that's where, again, the foundations aren't that different and that's the exciting thing about e-commerce is that really, the biggest businesses in the world have a Shopify Plus site and someone who's starting up right now can have a Shopify site in not that long and they'll be set up on Shopify Klaviyo. You know they can set their whole tech stack up exactly the way that you want, which it's just the same foundations.
Speaker 2:The implementation's obviously, you know, more complicated at the larger level, but there isn't, you know if you're doing it right. You're following a very similar model, for sure. The only other piece, then, is you can get the email marketing side right. So there's a lot of email marketing that is essential for this type of scaling. That's going to be a balance of like how much you invested there through your growth when you don't yet have a lot of customers, whereas you know if we've got a big brand, a lot of times they're coming in with 150,000 customer list already that we're working with and it's like, okay, email marketing is probably the biggest impact that we could have, you know from the start. So that's certainly one of the big differences as well, but not to I mean, it's still. There's foundations there, you just need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. I think you're right. Email marketing is, you know, always. I think it's still underutilized or undervalued because people get so many emails these days. But you know, but one of the things I say, especially to early e-commerce businesses, who I do speak to quite a bit it's like just spend time now making sure that you've got a strategy in place to get that email, get that data to bring them off platform. Own that data because you're going to need it as you grow and even when you're looking to sell a business. If you don't have a database, you don't have a lot.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, there's also SMS, and SMS is a pretty high performing channel if you can get it right as well. And I do think that the dynamics of what this can look like are changing a bit as well. Like we're running a lot of kind of opt-in campaigns where you know we're saying, hey, we're going to have deals all through June. Do you want us to send you an SMS once every three days with the deal of the day, Something like that? And that'll be a really small list in comparison to the total list size but generate the most revenue for the month. So I do think there are tactics here that can drive sales from not large lists if you take the right approach and you have the right offers and understanding of your customers. And you do have to have those foundations really tight from the start to be able to do that. And that's also kind of how you're integrating segments within your list. Like just set that up right from the start rather than try to fix it down the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just gonna say that also comes down to as you just touched on there segmentation, but also making sure that, yeah and again we can tie that back to probably the theme of the podcast is around knowing your customers. By talking to your customers, you're going to get better opt-in rates, you're going to get better open rates, you're going to get better click-throughs and conversions. If you're sending something that's relevant to them, and if it's not relevant to them, then why would you send it in the first place? So, yeah, having that really good, clean data and talking to your customers more to understand what is actually true value for them, or what is just a sales email that you've sent and it's a little bit sloppy that's the 1% or 2% difference between nailing your e-com and getting only fair results.
Speaker 2:And I really think that the phrase you said there of the value you can provide them is the most important thing.
Speaker 2:We, as performance marketers, are constantly thinking about the value that our customers can provide us in the sales and revenue that we're trying to drive. But that is a transaction where we are providing first value through marketing. I think, the more that we have that mindset of how do we, with some of this creative, it is about actually getting them to enjoy the experience of the ad while also getting that point across, whatever we're trying to do. But in the end it is about value for the customer and the more you understand that, the more revenue you unlock with happy customers. And that's the exciting part. That's the part that when this all kind of came together for me, I was just so excited to be doing e-commerce marketing because it is a win-win. It is a feedback loop that is driving a better experience for customers and revenue for the businesses. When you're working with a great business, that's the dream, that's what I love to do, and it's not always the case, but when it is, you could do some extraordinary things, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. That's a great sentiment. I've got a couple more questions before we wrap up. I wanted to just go back and revisit that brand conversation because I think it is really important. Again, I do see across sort of my agency and just e-commerce businesses that I talk to. Generally I don't think enough is done to build brand yet. Brand is the moat around your business.
Speaker 1:It's a protection, it's something that you can do that others can't because it's your brand. And it almost gets me to a point where we talk about and I haven't said this question through to you in advance, so we'll see how you go with this one but we're seeing the rise of Timu and Shine. Obviously you've been around now, but a lot of brands are starting to come up into those sort of headwinds and dealing with the price point of Timu, which you just can't compete with, I think brand even more so you need to understand and communicate why that brand is important. Do you come across that conversation with the brands that you work with? Is Timu in that conversation and what are some of the things that you've done or considerations in terms of getting around competing with them on the search engine results pages and the price points? I mean?
Speaker 2:I think there's a few things there. One I would say is that kind of category level non-branded search. That's a tough spot right when you're getting these really discounted Timu, exactly like discounted businesses coming in saying we've got the same product but for a third of the price point or whatever the case may be. Like that's. That's a tough one. I do think people learn. You know what they get from certain channels. So there's a dynamic there that can be overcome.
Speaker 2:The brand piece overall it's not my expertise, right, and it's not something that I like I always tell businesses. You know, like if you're here to grow a brand, then like we're not the right partner because like we're going to be pushing up against the boundaries of breaking your brand, like that's what a good performance marketer is really is really doing is finding out you know how far can we go and then working there. So that is always the dynamic. But I do, like you know, I spent about four or five years leading the marketing for Bellamy's Organic, which was has a very specific dynamic to their industry. It's baby formula and when you're marketing baby formula you can't talk about the product. There's a World Health Organization, basically regulation or guideline that says you can't market baby formula products. You know it goes to, you know, to not prioritize formula over breastfeeding and every formula company is bought into that guideline, so you have to market it through brand. So that's a real challenge for a marketer like me, and the way we get through that is through community and through content marketing.
Speaker 2:We ran a lot of you know, social, you know UGC style competitions.
Speaker 2:This is also back like 2017, when that was just yeah, that just took off. That type of stuff building up a huge database, segmenting that database really, really clearly, and then a content strategy that I mean the content strategy we built out literally was sharing relevant content for moms from the day they were first found out they were pregnant through to when their child turned two years old, which is kind of when they go outside of the Bellamy's organic product lineup, and that right, there was the way that we were able to bring and this is an email every two weeks. So some moms were getting emails from Bellamy's with advice and content for three years through this program. And I guess for me that's where I would build a brand. I would be going onto social and engaging with customers directly to get them to create content and sharing that content, and then I'd be finding ways to provide content that was really valuable for them and getting that out. But I don't know, that's kind of the performance marketer's version of it. I'm sure there's probably smarter ways.
Speaker 1:That's good takeaways. And you know, I mean I heard Gary Vee, on one of his many, many sort of channels the other day, mentioned that he hired a like a basically I don't know what he called it. Let's call it a chief listening officer, but he gets. Obviously they're doing they're working with some pretty big brands as well, but they have someone who, for his own brand, just like, just basically like sees what everyone's saying on social media around his content and questions, and then it just provides him more ways to create more content around those comments. So I think social listening is starting to become a trendy sort of subject to talk about.
Speaker 2:But it's also a sales channel. This is one of those things where I'm like every now and then we work with a brand that doesn't have customer service commenting on their ads and when we're like scaling, we're getting, you know, 20, 30 comments and people are asking like you know what's the price? You know, how does this compare with this? Like, if you have someone on there listening, definitely I love that. But also just getting in the game and being like, oh yeah, check this, or knowing the products and customers and getting in there, you can drive a lot of sales through that as almost its own channel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, 100%, mate. I'm conscious of your time, but I've got two more questions for you. Who do you look to for advice? It's always a good question I like to ask.
Speaker 2:I mean first and foremost. I look to my wife for advice.
Speaker 2:She knows me best and certainly knows my weaknesses the closest and most up front, so she gives me great advice on when I'm maybe not seeing things right. Otherwise, in terms of marketing, it's my team, so I have the benefit of working with just some incredible marketers experts in scaling, meta, experts in customer research or in customer lifecycle, email marketing, klaviyo all these different pieces where I just have the privilege of working with these incredible people. So I find that I really struggle to get out onto networking and to LinkedIn, and so I really am able to stay up to date on where I need to be just through the standard that my team, that I'm basically just trying to keep up with them. So I feel like I'm just quite lucky in having that dynamic. But there's a lot of really strong direct-to-consumer e-commerce marketers out there. There's some really good ones on LinkedIn. I would say, if you're looking for the right people, find the ones that are talking about creative and they're probably on the right track.
Speaker 1:Okay, fantastic. And lastly, mate, what sort of is a typical client that you work with? So if we get the listeners out there and they're wanting to work with you or the Web Profits team, who is that perfect client that is most suited to work with you guys?
Speaker 2:I mean certainly right now we're working with I mentioned before Ninja Kitchen and Shark Clean. The brand is Shark Ninja. This is a big retail brand, a global retail brand that's looking to make a big play in Australia to drive direct-to-consumer growth. Certainly, that is our ideal we love working with. My expertise is very much in retail brands that want to open the direct-to-consumer channel. On the other side, though, we also would love working with e-commerce brands that have a lot of the fundamentals to scale but are still much more early stage, and that's where the team gets really excited as well. We've worked with a brand, for example, called I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say the name, so I just won't, but they're in the teeth whitening space right, they're not a big brand, but we're getting some amazing results in scaling them up.
Speaker 2:Same with one in the bed linen space where we had some kind of started, when they started there at about 20K revenue per month and we've gotten them up to like 300K per month over six, seven months. So those types of businesses are great and we also work in customer acquisition, lead gen as well. That's the other segment of direct to consumer which obviously isn't the focus here, but we do have a lot of expertise and lead gen as well. Right, that's the other segment of direct-to-consumer which obviously isn't the focus here, but we do have a lot of expertise and specialize there as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, perfect. So when you say lead gen building up that database for e-commerce businesses, is that as a strategy that you mean? Or B2B? No, I mean this is kind of the other segment.
Speaker 2:So you're talking your insurance companies or your local plumbers or anything where they've got a sales team that'll drive the final sale, but it's still direct to consumer approach. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, nice one. There is some of that in terms of with our e-commerce brands as well, depending on the strategy, but usually with e-commerce we'll just be revenue focused entirely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfect, made some really great insights today. I love the fact that you've mentioned creative is the biggest difference or one of the key indicators to scaling your e-commerce business, which is a message that hasn't come through as much this year from the guests that I've had on, but we obviously haven't had someone like yourself in that space.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, really appreciative of of sharing that knowledge and you know the foundational elements of the e-commerce businesses and brands you've worked with, so I really appreciate sharing some pretty awesome insights. I'm sure that the listening audience will get a lot out of this one.
Speaker 2:Well, I really appreciate the opportunity and I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Perfect mate. Well, yeah, look forward to catching up. We'll have to have you back on the show soon. Sounds great.
Speaker 2:Have a good one, thank.