YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Becker

lines on the record: 106
first: 2023-05-07
most recent: 2023-05-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Have the more marketing qualified leads I'll get, the more sales accepted leads I'll get, and ultimately the more opportunities there will be and the more revenue we'll generate. If I think about this world of lead generation on performance marketing platforms as a function of cost per lead in that sense that I just described, then the tendency is always to want to drive down the cost per lead, thinking that that's the efficiency. I can get more cheaper leads and that will yield more revenue. When in fact it turns out that if you flip that conversation on its head and say not all opportunities and sales are equal and instead of focusing up front on a cost per lead, I now want to focus on what is a high value customer. So the cost per lead is actually higher, but the ROI of targeting those people is also higher. And so to get the higher quality leads, it's not a function of CPL. And so that is a very common pitfall that we see when people come to us. The antidote.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm agnostic here in terms of where people should be spending money. I see that this world in terms of impressions and clicks and does that conform to the marketing economics of a project that needs to be achieved in order for it to grow. It's less about where to place your money and how to think about the placement of those funds. And so the common mistake that we see as people build out a funnel, so to speak, for B2B lead gen projects or B2C lead gen projects is they'll be overly reliant on the first of a sequence of metrics that ultimately yields a sales. So typically it's something like cost per lead, marketing qualified lead, sales accepted lead. There might be a couple more metrics there. And then eventually like a sale occurs. And so the thinking is that, okay, for sales to occur, I need more leads at the top of the funnel. The more leads I have.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Content. It takes a machine, and that's expensive. And so that all factors into the cost of not only just the ad dollars, but the creative resourcing and investment that's required to power that. So it can be done in a more nimble manner if you're spending less, but you can't really get to like a million dollars a month on TikTok without having like a huge amount of creative being pushed to that channel.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very exciting opportunity. Other brands need to pay attention to this and figure out what their entry point is going to be. And just because the innovation hasn't happened for B2B SaaS yet on TikTok doesn't mean it won't. TikTok wants that to happen. And so the question becomes how? And so someone will unlock that and they'll make a billion dollars because of it. But I wouldn't recommend that channel to everybody yet. At Thrive, for instance, We don't have a huge amount of people coming to us yet saying, hey, I'm spending $750,000 a month on TikTok. Can you help me type thing? The other problem with TikTok is that it's extraordinarily creative asset dependent and heavy. And so like you are launching net new assets several times per week. It is hard for creative teams and brands to produce that much.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are e comm based, if you're wholesale, retail based, you know, anything like direct to consumer, you have to investigate TikTok and try and figure out whether there's a way of promoting your products there, basically. It's a massive, highly engaged audience with somewhat specific demographics.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are great at cultivating and following their content is highly engaging. Those types of organizations crush it. Also, companies that got really good at partnering with influencers. So we haven't talked about like partner marketing that much, but affiliate marketing companies got into this early and then influencer marketing networks are all over this. But essentially having these third parties be an ambassador for your brand in an authentic way. partnering with them having them generate the content and that's the nature of the partnership stuff like that seems to work quite well”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say. But essentially, those channels are wonderful. They're not at the point yet where they're kind of ubiquitous. Like every single advertiser that has ever worked with us, I think, in the last 10 years is for sure on Google. Like everybody does that. And then the question is, what else can I invest money in with the expectation of profitability? And so TikTok and Amazon. And even if I want to break out YouTube, they tend to be a little bit more specific and they definitely work, but not for everybody yet. And so the question becomes like, will TikTok become as prominent as a social ads platform like meta ads? And we just don't know yet. What we see working very nicely on TikTok, by the way, are these like founder-led brands where the founder is the ambassador and they're doing those handheld videos with their iPhone. They're talking about the merits of the products that they make. They're talking about the problems that they solve.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most individuals or organizations tend to want to place ads where there's a lot of views and engagement. And so, and the king of this right now is definitely TikTok. And so TikTok faces its own set of challenges and arguably there is as much an opportunity there as a barrier at the moment. I love TikTok. I'm a consumer of content on TikTok, not a producer of content on TikTok. Their ads platform kind of reminds me of where Facebook ads was like six, seven years ago. It's not super sophisticated and attribution is not great yet, but you can get cheap CPCs because there's just fewer organizations advertising there, fewer companies have figured out how to make that work. And same thing with Amazon. Amazon is a bit of a bespoke channel. Like it doesn't work for a B2B SaaS company. It's more specific to D2C.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I say Google and I say Facebook, I'm talking about the Google ecosystem of channels inclusive of YouTube. And when I talk about Facebook, I'm talking about Facebook, Instagram, and probably eventually WhatsApp, which I think will probably launch ads later this year. With all that said, some interesting opportunities these days really exist on channels like Amazon and TikTok, as well as a number of other challenger channels, I think. Snap, I'll talk a little bit less about because I think it really...”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get asked this a lot. And I think there are tools for different types of functions that we undertake in the process of running paid acquisition for different brands. But these days, most of the testing that we do is within the channels themselves. So Meta ads, Google ads. I keep touching on those two specifically because they're the most advanced, in my opinion. They're really powerful. And so the good news here is that you don't necessarily need some exotic tool to do sophisticated creative testing. You can do it in platform. And you can occupy, you can use the structure that I just kind of outlined as a starting point.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really great example. And so the question becomes as a company and as a brand do you arrive at those learnings anecdotally by accident? Is it the brilliance of one person on the team that the whole brand is predicated upon in terms of performance? Or do you put a very rigorous structure around testing and the iteration of assets and how to determine whether something works over another thing that is a process that yields the outcomes that you're looking for? And so a lot of times with agencies, people talk to us about the obvious hard skills that we have, but the soft skills are around process that can be deployed that can actually be the difference between being highly sophisticated or unsophisticated. Internal teams do this too, but that Airbnb example is a great illustration of how if you put the right testing in place.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or triple, you know, the ROAS that we were seeing type thing. So it's these minute differences that you can test into that ultimately can drive performance.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So great about these brands basically. So I can't speak to like specific clients because I'm not allowed to talk about the work that we've done in large part. But that would be one example. And another example is we worked with a furniture company several years ago which scaled dramatically, but they were having difficulty early on thinking through how to scale social ads. And so, you know, paid search worked really well for them. Social ads, again, they had these highly produced styled rooms. And one of the owners had their dog in the office all the time. And so they have these models like sitting on furniture or whatever it was. And they would take these beautiful styled shots of their furniture in a room. And one of the art directors was like, put the dog on the couch and let's take some photos of, you know, dogs on furniture, which made it more playful and approachable. That one change resulted in a total unlock of their performance on paid social channels. It would double.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the brand guidelines of different companies would end up yielding these highly polished assets. And when you launch those on Instagram back in the day or something like that, what we found is that they would always underperform next to user generated assets. So a brand that essentially has an influencer in front of it that says I tried this product, I love it. I'm filming this ad for my iPhone. Like, look, check it out. Here's the product. Here's me. I'm better off for whatever it is that they're talking about. The unpolished, like, you know, iPhone, mobile phone creative, suddenly we realize massively outperformed these other channels because there was an authenticity to it. And rather than the brands themselves saying like, hey, trust us, our product is great. Here's like a third party essentially validating what is”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ad performance so that we can gather learnings, send that back to a creative team, and say, hey, it turns out that when this copy is used at this stage of the funnel, it converts 50% more frequently than this other copy. So let's now take that copy, use it as our base copy, and challenge it with a different type of copy and see if we can continue iterate and refine. So that's a very practical example of how add creative testing might work on a channel like Meta. You ask for specific examples where we've seen like an unlock. There's two that come to mind. Several years ago, we realized that highly produced ads from brand teams, and I'm not, there's nothing wrong with brand teams. We work with them all the time. They do amazing work. I think we're just trying to work as a singular unit as opposed to being fragmented.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will serve one ad different number of impressions than the other ad, in which case we then have to say, what is a leveling factor that allows us to look at these two ads equally, even though one received dramatically more impressions than the other? This becomes where it becomes subjective in terms of how you want to determine success. But a good example is looking at like the click-through rate, which is essentially a ratio or a metric like impressions until conversion, which is a, you know, leveling metric that allows us to determine even though in a scenario where two ads facing the same audience within the same campaign received different numbers of impressions, we can still measure the efficiency or effectiveness of one ad over the other using metrics like that. And so from a testing point of view, I think that this is one way that we might look at trying to”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think from a testing point of view, let's say I was running ads on meta, beneath the campaign level when I create a campaign, I would have the structure that my testing might take would be that I would have an audience, a single audience at the ad set level, and then I would have two nearly identical creatives within that ad set. The only thing being different across those two creative assets is a single variable. So it might be the copy, it might be an image or whatnot. That allows us to”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then determine which style and feature of an ad performs best at which stage of the funnel versus which audience. And the results that we see are dramatically different from brand to brand. But if you're not undertaking rigorous testing in conjunction with how you are driving the iteration and design of your ads, then you will not make progress essentially.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End to the conversation where they take an action, hopefully, that the brand that we're working with is looking for. And so there's a clear beginning, middle, and end to that. And one of the major pitfalls that we see is that certain brands just dump one homogenous message into all of their targeting. You see the same ad over and over again. It creates banner blindness and its total lack of efficiency. The antidote to that is to have resources dedicated to paid and essentially iterate upon the creative assets themselves based on the data that we see coming from ads and campaigns in various channels. And so what that means is that you have to experiment. You have to take a bit of a scientific approach, although it's a bit of an art and a bit of a science. You have to try and isolate variables, maintain similar conditions across.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a file full of random assets for paid acquisition without any sense of how the channel works. And what I mean by that is these days, we're using the analogy, the classic analogy of the funnel to organize our thinking around creative assets. So you can think about this as like generating intent at the top of funnel and capturing intent at the bottom of the funnel. When I think about an experience that I want, you know, a consumer to have on Facebook, an audience targeting and creative, I think about us beginning a conversation at the top of funnel creatively with an audience, having that conversation change as we say different things and the audience that we're targeting ultimately graduates through different behaviors on our website from one to another and then ultimately it resulting in it.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I don't know if that's a great idea for consumers, by the way, but in the meantime, there's certain things that have just been fully automated. In the context of creative, it's still one of these things that for now is not auto-generated in the world of AI and all the changes that we're seeing. Maybe that's something that will change. But for now, essentially creative directors and their teams are concepting and producing different types of assets. And so there's a bunch of problems that we typically see when people come to us. So number one, performance marketing and brand marketing in a lot of organizations are two different things. And the designers that occupy brand teams, bandwidth and whatnot often don't have a sense of how paid acquisition works. And so one of the pitfalls of working with certain companies or the mistake that they make is the design team will hand off.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was so complicated, and there were so many different things that you could get wrong, their solution, the channels like the big tech company's solution to this is figuring out for you. So eventually Google wants you to say, hey, I'm Google, give me your credit card, and I'll take care of everything else.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly. So when we say creative, we're referring to the assets that power typically visual programmatic or paper-click campaigns on social channels or display networks. And so literally, you know, the motion graphics ad that you see on Facebook, the user-generated content that you see on TikTok, or a static ad that you might see that has like a pretty picture in it or whatever. And so I think that when we talk about creative as a big lever around efficiency and optimization, the underlying conversation there is that over time, our industry has been heavily automated. So a lot of the levers, so to speak, around performance have been automated by Google and Facebook over the last seven to ten years. That's because originally when you ran these campaigns, you needed to have like a rocket scientist in front of them.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of measurement, whereas paid, the ROI is still a difficult problem to solve, but there was a lot more of a linear relationship as it relates to attribution. And so paid being tangible was the reason why I leaned heavily into paid and ultimately away from SEO. But I do think that if you do SEO properly, the payoffs are indisputable and it is certainly an important part of a modern media mix.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Search engine optimization is different in that the attribution can be tough. It's difficult to determine whether ultimately the actions that you took contributed to a rise in organic traffic. You have to essentially correlate that. And the reason is because when you build clusters of content and you're grouped thematically and you're targeting buckets of keywords, whether they're long tail or head keywords, whatever it may be, you can publish all of that on your website. Google still has to crawl it. They run it through their analysis algorithm, which is comprised of 200 different signals, of which maybe like 20 to 30 have been publicly disclosed. So it's a bit of a black box. We don't really know ultimately what ROI comes off of that unless you're very sophisticated, like probably one of your other guests, Ethan.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I'm asked a question of, you know, should we put money into organic search or paid search? My response is often that they're actually not mutually exclusive to one another. So it's a great idea to do both. And that backs into my strategy of diversification of channels. So don't build up exclusively in one area and create volatility within your marketing mix, essentially. SEO is a wonderful marketing capability when it's built out correctly. I think the issues that you run into are cause and effect related. So one of the things that people really like”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can do those things and then understand their own marketing economics. In other words, like quite basically how much can we afford to spend in acquiring a customer on any channel before that acquisition is no longer profitable? So really focusing on the profitability of the bottom line and not just breakneck growth, for instance. Companies that have those capabilities and see the world that way tend to be successful in performance marketing.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to really be able to point to this company is really getting it right. And I think that you can do that, but it's like saying a friend of mine recently on Twitter tweeted this funny thing where he was like, you know, this is the number that I use to win the lottery, said every successful founder ever trying to give advice to other founders, right? And so in other words, like just because they won the lottery doesn't mean you're going to be successful picking the same number. To that extent, there is a bit of a playbook around, you know, modern day performance marketing. And that includes everything from really stringent and rigorous creative testing and thinking about that correctly to understanding the subjectivity of attribution and its strengths and weaknesses, doing a lot of work around validity of these campaigns. So really just like the measurement and whatnot, companies that”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they know they understand how many impressions they'll get. And on average, what the quality of impression is and how many dollars they can put behind that before it has a cliff, you know, in terms of ROI.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, these storms pass. And so when the economy improves, generally speaking, I imagine people will, you know, go back to trying to find as much inventory from a pay-per-click point of view that they can purchase as possible and figuring out the economics of how to do that.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On TikTok. They're buying loads of ads on other social channels like Facebook. They're investing in podcasting partnerships. But this is all digital paid acquisition, right? And so it had a wonderful effect on this really interesting business that they had already built. So yes, it's still doable. We still see people doing it. And I think that there's been a bit of a reckoning in the performance marketing industry pertaining to things like privacy and the changes that Apple made and people being very creeped out at how their data is being used, rightfully so. And then, you know, obviously the economy in 2022, we had a terrible macroeconomic shift where interest rates rise and inflations out of control. And so, of course, the first thing that people cut are typically marketing budgets. And we see Facebook and Google and other ad channels directly suffering from that. So all of that.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost exclusively through paid. Like grammarly is a really good example of this. They have been good at solving for this problem that exists around like understanding the cost per acquisition versus lifetime value, like how sticky customers are predicting how much revenue you can come from a customer and backing out into therefore how much we can pay per click and per lead and so on and so forth. Athletic Greens is another good example. So athletic greens is actually a pretty old company. I think they've been around for 10 years. I think they have retail distribution. I think they have done a lot of the more classic marketing things that are important in terms of developing that channel mix. But I think the amplification of that brand really, really gained traction quite recently where now everybody knows what athletic greens is. And that's because they're buying loads of”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put it this way every unicorn from like the 2010s era that scale did performance marketing, but not everyone during that time who did performance marketing scaled. So I want to remove the bias here that just because all the successful organizations did this didn't mean that it was like a magical channel for everyone. We had plenty of projects that we worked on that flatlined, you know, during that period. And so the sense that there was a period of time where this was easy or it worked on any project is not correct in my opinion. With that said, we see companies that are spending millions of dollars a month on performance marketing channels like Google and Meta still, despite all the ups and downs that they have faced. And they do so profitably. And I think there's some really great examples of companies that have scaled in relatively recent times.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Performance marketing. It is a very difficult channel to manage, and that's why people hire experts like us to help them with it because it's a never-ending problem with constantly changing issues. It's always been”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The data that is provided through paid channels allows you to have full end to end understanding of attribution, which is wrong. It's never been that way. And the other aspect of this is the patience to understand that every business is unique. And these metrics that we know are important are different for every business. Lifetime value, like propensity to repurchase ROAS, which is return on amount spent, CPAC, like all of these different things are different for every business. Even if I worked with two hotels in the same city, they would have different results based on the nuances of their budget, their brand, the market that they sit within, the services that they offer, and so on and so forth. And so I think that like everything else, the main problem here is that nobody should expect an overnight turnaround with”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product market fit. If you know that your business sells into audiences, let's say you are a social media influencer or you had a really strong email marketing game or organically your content surfaces within Google search results. Or you did a lot of direct mail and linear television and billboard advertising and that worked. Other things work, it is highly likely that paid acquisition will work. The issue for most companies is in this Incorrect assumption that”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model, which predictively can determine in a statistically significant way the likelihood that one lead will convert to revenue over another. And so there are ways around the slower payback period that still end up being pretty accurate based on what you're bidding on today versus the latent revenue that will be accrued to those campaigns through attribution.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always nice when there's a quick turnaround on investment and return. And that's wonderful for like D to C or e-commerce style businesses where they're essentially taking the revenue to fuel additional inventory and operating costs. However, not all businesses work that way. And so in a B2C or B2B lead generation scenario, we have to undertake pretty sophisticated modeling around these abstract concepts like lifetime value, which is difficult because like that's You know, most businesses are relatively new that we work with. And so the idea of lifetime value is kind of a misnomer. Like they don't know what that is yet. But we have to model things like LTV to CAC. So cost per acquisition costs versus lifetime value and the period within which the payback occurs. You end up getting to a pretty sophisticated place where you can build out things like a lead square.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hundred billion dollars on just Google and Facebook in three months, and the majority of that revenue is from ads. And so like this works really well for lots of different companies. It's just a question of at what scale.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a bit. Do they have a professional marketers on staff? So, are there people who have experience doing what we do that speak our language, so to speak? Or is part of this an organizational educational and creating buy-in through stakeholders process that needs to take place? Do they have technical resources? If we say, hey, tracking an attribution is broken, here's how to solve that. Can you implement it? And so on and so forth. And so there's no one magic formula for what works or what type of company will be successful on performance marketing channels. I think like just as evidence of this, Google, which I think had a downquarter reported sales this week and it was $70 billion in three months and Facebook, similarly I think just recorded yesterday evening and it was $32 billion.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would say that the answer to that question is different at different stages of a company's life cycle. So early stage, you know, look at what the company is doing, look at your own company. Have you established product market fit? So is this an idea that has yet to be tested and are they entirely looking to performance marketing to scale everything? So are they at risk of it becoming like an over-reliance on performance marketing at a later stage, we look at certain criteria that they might or might not possess. And so typically that will come down to resourcing. So the question at a later stage is not, does it work, but to what scale can it work? And so we're looking at things like, do they have adequate creative resources and buy-in that does creative resourcing tie into performance? And can we create a feedback loop there around testing? I'll talk to you about that.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Channel and its performance. And similarly, I always say to people that the first rule of I think the comments like the real crash and burn scenarios that I've seen are these like not fly-by-night brands, but brands that figured out, just like with Uber, I figured out this weird tie-in where I could like make free money from their referral system. Sometimes people find kind of like shortcuts hacks, if you will, to scale rapidly because of one specific nuance of like the Facebook ad platform or something like that. And what they fail to see is that those loopholes come and go. And so if they scale massively and their entire business is predicated on the performance of this one loophole that they found or like investing everything in a single channel and then the conditions change, they're not going to be very happy and the business will suffer dramatically. And so when I think about this, it's a responsible channel mix diversity and”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turn and in the same manner that I would not take all of your life savings and dump it into a single stock. I don't recommend putting all of your money into a single performance marketing channel and then somewhat exposing you to the volatility of fluctuating CPCs or changing market conditions. And so I would agree with you that it is a drug in a sense if you have all of your eggs in one basket and that basket takes you on a very intense roller coaster in terms of performance. But when I think about the fact that Thrive manages $500 million a year, I think of myself to an extent as like a fund manager. We are managing people's money with the expectation of a return. And part of the strategy is to diversify across channels. And so we decrease the reliance of any individual project on a singular”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be seen as a drug, I suppose, when you are entirely reliant on it to fuel the revenue of your business. And so the analogy that I try and use here is that it would be very dangerous if I was advising you with your life savings and I told you to put it all in a single stock in the stock market. Stocks can be volatile. Instead, And as a result of that, your net worth would fluctuate quite a bit in the short term and the long term based on a lot of things that you don't control, like the external markets or like things that are happening within the performance of that particular company that you invested in. When I think about all of the marketing mix, so email, direct mail, linear television, performance marketing, whatever it is, I think about it as investing capital with the expectation of a”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really great question. And so I think there's a couple different things that need to be unpacked here. So paid acquisition or performance marketing performance marketing.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of interchangeable terms. Performance marketing is a common term paid acquisition is a common term. Some people think of those two things as growth marketing, whereas I see growth marketing as a bigger practice area within which paid acquisition sits. And then, of course, there's subsets, there's social ads, there's paid search, there's programmatic. And so there's a lot of different ways of saying the same thing.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think people often talk about entrepreneurs who have been successful and they comment that they're lucky. Whereas I actually look at that situation and I think that you have to make your own luck. So I could have been like, oh, cool. I met this guy in the back of a taxi and that was it. But I decided to take a risk, you know, being that I could get embarrassed or nothing could happen or they could shut down like this referral, you know, gimmicky thing that I was doing. I had like, you know, very little to lose, I guess, ultimately, but a lot of people just don't make these moves in life because they're nervous or they're worried too much about what the downside might be. And so I very much was like, I'm going to shoot my shot here. And you put yourself in situations where everybody has luck, but you have to capitalize on it, basically. And so that was an example of, you know, being willing to take a risk and it paying off like pretty big time, I think.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And they were kind of like, hey, this is bad. You have to stop doing this. But can we hire you to solve the problem? And so what started off as me running projects for like local bars in Vancouver or clothing stores or whatever it was turned into me landing early stage Uber as a client and really graduating us from like competent professionals to leaders in our sector and so it was a fascinating project and we worked with Uber for 10 years.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunch of his lieutenants. If you've read the book, Super Pumped, like all the people that we dealt with at the time are in the book and crewed.”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of spamming Uber's referral program. So kind of a long story, but essentially I was using paid search to camp out on their branded keywords. And as people would sign up with my confusingly similar snippet to Uber's organic snippet, I was essentially siphoning off referral credits. So I would get $20 every single time someone signed up. And I ended up making like tens of thousands of dollars doing this. And so fast forward, you know, I'm getting a drink at the bar next to Garrett. And in my head, I'm kind of like, should I tell him about this? Maybe I can land them as a client. This would be really interesting. And essentially, I tell him, I'm like, hey, I'm doing this. I'm adding zero value, but this is a loophole in your marketing system. And, you know, someone should close it. He essentially is like, I need to report this to the board. But, you know, here's my card, write me what you're doing, and we'll contact you. And so I get contacted by”
2023-05-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source