Need help outsmarting industry giants? Learn how to outmaneuver your biggest competitors, even as a challenger brand with a limited marketing budget. Whether breaking into a new market, displacing a leader, or gaining a competitive edge, our expert insights will provide actionable strategies for success.

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Greg Harbinson (00:00:18):

All right. Thank you everybody for joining us. I think we’ve got our participants kind of popping in now. We’ll give it just a minute before we start into some of the content, but while we do that, get a little bit of the housekeeping out of the way. One, thank you everybody for joining us. We’re going to be recording the session. I’m sure you got a notice that we’ll be sending this out after the fact.

So we have a handful of slides, but a lot of this is just going to be conversing with some of the panelists, but you’ll get that in your inbox. After we wrap this up, we also have some ability to take questions throughout. If you can just pop those into the chat, we’ll be moderating that and kind of at the end we’ll try and reserve a little bit of time where we can go into some specifics around some of those questions.

So without a lot of further ado, I will introduce some of the people that we’ll be popping into the discussion here, and then we’ll get into our discussion today. So I’m joined by a couple of my Amsive  colleagues. So I’ve got Laurin Bobo, Senior Director of Digital Media, Chalice Jones, director of Social and Influencer, and Joshua Squires, Associate Director of SEO. So we’ve got a few minds representing some of the different practice areas of digital marketing.

So we will talk about a good mixture of things to keep in mind. With that, I want to give just a quick overview of what we’ll be discussing here today. I know you got a little bit of the rundown in the registration. We’re going to be talking about challenger brands and their marketing. So specifically, what do you do when you’re competing for market share against companies with vastly larger budgets or market presence?

In essence, what do you do when you can’t afford to go toe to toe against some of those bigger incumbents? If you’ve got a smaller budget, you need a smarter strategy. So we’ve got a cross-functional group of strategists on the call today. We’re going to unpack a few of the tactics that we have found to be particularly useful in this scenario, more of a guerilla warfare approach to marketing. And to kick us off, I’m going to go into the first question.

We have a few primers that we’ll tackle and hear some perspectives from each of the panelists today. So a general overview for the panelists as we think about the scenario, the landscape that we just laid out, what do challenger brands need to be mindful of when developing their marketing strategies? To kick us off, Chalice, I’ll throw it over to you.

Developing Marketing Strategies for Challenger Brands

Chalice Jones (00:02:52):

Yeah, so I think when I think about that foundational element, where do we want to start? It’s really considering what’s even going on out there. What are we up against? You can’t really beat something that you don’t know what it is. So getting a really deep and strong understanding of what’s happening in the competitive space, and there’s all sorts of tools you can do around that.

Now, you know, from my angle, we often use things like social listening and try to get an understanding of what is the share of voice out there, what are we up against so we can really analyze what the field looks like before we can go out and try to make some big gains against it.

Greg Harbinson (00:03:38):

What about you, Josh? Anything to add there on that one?

Josh Squires(00:03:43):

Yeah, I think one of the things I see most often is challenger brands not having the clearest or most unique value propositions. And it seems like obvious advice, but it’s pretty underrated, especially because if you’ve founded a company and you’re a challenger brand, you probably have it in your head day in, day out, what your value proposition is, but it doesn’t always make it to the page and it doesn’t always make it to your audience. So making sure that you have perfect clarity in that, that you’re doing those checks before you’re putting messaging out in the world that…How is this reflecting our value proposition? What are we telling people about ourselves that we really want them to know?

Are we giving them reasons to shop with us, to buy from us, to come to our site? And you can even break that down by your larger and your niche markets, larger, larger audiences, really you’re just trying to peel off a couple of users here and there from the bigger guys. And in those cases, typically okay to have a pretty similar value proposition.

But for niche audiences, adding that specificity, really knowing where you fit among people who have businesses like yours really makes a difference. So spending that time on messaging and value proposition and sort of filling out that matrix of how we’re different in our space and in adjacent spaces, really great way to gain more attention, get more clicks, really actually reach your audiences.

Greg Harbinson (00:05:11):

So Chalice made the point about competitor research as we go here and just general audience research. So as you think about value proposition and the way that it starts to represent itself in, maybe your keyword strategy or your targeting, I guess…How aware of or sensitive to what the big incumbents are doing, do you need to be? Or maybe how do you contextualize what they’re doing in terms of their value props versus where you start to map yours? Not just in terms of differentiation, I guess, in terms of how you try not to kind of go head to head with what they’re doing.

Chalice Jones (00:05:59):

I think that there’s a handful of things there. I think it’s not just understanding the depth of the competitive landscape, but understanding your audience deeply too. And then the intersection of those two things together, those things coming together is what really creates that value proposition. And something allows you to differentiate because it’s not the tiers, maybe how our products different, but here’s how we’re relating with our audience differently.

Greg Harbinson (00:06:23):

Yeah, I like that.

Laurin Bobo (00:06:24):

And when we talk about audience, audience is such a key part of this entire conversation. If you are competing with a brand that is going to outspend, you have to outsmart them. And the number one way to do that is with your audience being so precise about who you’re targeting, not targeting these big blanket buys, not hitting everybody out in the universe, hitting the people that are most likely to be in market, hitting the people that are most likely to be hand raisers in ready to buy your product ready to learn more.

And the way to do that is just by using a very tactical science approach to your audience, making sure that you are using all of the tools that you have at hand, social listening, first party data. If you can grab those email addresses about a prospect or even your own customers to model off of, it’s the number one way to make sure that you are hitting the most likely prospects versus wasting dollars that you maybe don’t have compared to a larger brand who might have more money to throw out a problem.

So making sure that we are being as precise as possible with our audience targeting to make sure that that value prop is getting to the right people and we’re not wasting dollars there.

Greg Harbinson (00:07:33):

What about a company who, I guess challenger doesn’t necessarily connote a startup, but maybe what about companies that don’t have that first party data already to lean on? Like you mentioned email addresses. What are some of the things that they might consider as they’re figuring out where to start?

Laurin Bobo(00:07:50):

Yeah, there are so many data providers out in the world these days that are so sophisticated that can model data. Plenty of providers can help with that. But just kind of starting with some signals. What do you know about your audience? What sort of behaviors are they doing? And even just going off of what their browsing behaviors are, what sorts of websites are they visiting? What sorts of content are they consuming? What locations are they visiting that can help identify whether or not they’re going to be interested in what you’re offering them?

Common Pitfalls for Challenger Brands

Greg Harbinson (00:08:21):

So I know our first question was about general considerations when building a marketing strategy, but maybe to flip that question to its opposite, what do we think about in terms of pitfalls that we see companies in this not category, but this definition set of challenger brands falling into when they’re building out their marketing?

Laurin Bobo(00:08:43):

I can kick it off with a couple. One of the biggest ones that we see is brands focusing too much on the immediate sale. So I know I just talked making sure that you’re hitting people that are in market that are most likely to convert, but there is a balance to hitting those people that are already aware of your brand, they’re already raising their hand, they’re already ready to purchase while also building brand equity. We talk about it on the paid media side pretty frequently.

That brand search is king if that’s the most relevant, the highest relevant people are going to be the ones typing in your brand ready to convert. But if they don’t know about your brand, they’re not going to search. You can’t just rely on brand search. You got to tell ’em to search. You got to use all the tools to make sure that they are searching, otherwise they’re never going to know to search for your brand.

So balancing the plays in that regard, and we’ll talk a little bit about it in a minute about how you can still be very surgically precise with your audiences even on a big awareness buy, but just making sure that you are balancing that. Otherwise, if you get blinded by the immediate sale, the CPA is those down funnel things, it will…The overemphasis on the short term will kill you in the long run.

Chalice Jones (00:09:58):

And I think that’s something that we see when we’re looking from a holistic, specifically digital marketing angle, marketing angle when we’re just trying to ask somebody to do something…So specifically, we’re really missing all this opportunity and if we think about it on the broader scale, there’s all these ways you can still be surgically precise, you can still be targeted, you can still capture those people that are most likely to be hand raisers outside of also things that you are paying for that targeting with as well.

We can go and find, get a deeper understanding with that data of who these audiences are, where we can be with them, where can we meet, what platforms are they on? Again, from my angle, where can we go speak with them? Are there certain platforms from them? Be engaging because again, if they’re the most likely to be there, we need to get in front of them and let them know who we are. And there’s a lot of ways both organically and in a paid capacity to be able to do that, and when we work together on them, we really miss some of those potholes that we might stumble over if we’re just looking at this quick gain.

Greg Harbinson (00:11:00):

I mean, it speaks to the longer term lens that you have to have with this. I guess there’s that early ground that you can make up, but if you think about how much market share you’re trying to take as that challenge of brand thinking about, I mean, you obviously have those who are actively searching for your brand or who are searching for things where you can convert on that sale right now, but kind of building up that pipeline further up the funnel is a great way of turning on a more sustainable market capture engine.

Laurin Bobo (00:11:33):

It’s all about balance.

Greg Harbinson (00:11:34):

Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Squires (00:11:35):

Just to tack on real quick, talking about sustainability in that approach, it’s super important for search and particularly organic search to really hit those high intent users in the beginning because what you’re effectively doing is training for of us, it’s going to be Google, but generally training the search algorithms that your site is very directly connected to the thing that people are searching for and that it is a good experience and that they should send more traffic your way.

So when people search for your brand, when you finally get them to do that search and you’ve targeted the right audience and they’re those high intent users, they’re going to come to the site, they’re going to spend a little time, they’re probably going to buy something, and Google can see most of those engagements, they see that that was a success in sending a user to your site, and they’re going to do that more and more often from an organic search perspective.

That’s how you climb rankings and earn organic impressions, and that happens over a long period of time, but when you measure your ROI over months and years, you’re decreasing the total cost of your marketing efforts for that audience and making it easier to go after acquisition and higher spend.

Chalice Jones (00:12:44):

Yeah, I think that just last thing to add here is that that thinking and that philosophy is it feels like channel agnostic even with how everything is moving today with the increasing changes on social platforms to be search optimized and social search and so many people starting their purchase journeys there.

We have to be considering that on all of these platforms. They’re not just conversion places, but we have to be providing that entire funnel experience everywhere. We are not just only relying on this tactic or that one to fill those gaps.

Greg Harbinson (00:13:29):

A lot of that just speaks to building equity within a conversation. Right. Josh, love that you pointed out. It’s not just about kind building that awareness and relationship with users, it’s also establishing credibility with the delivery platforms. That’s important as well. Alright. What else do we got on this one?

Laurin Bobo (00:13:52):

Another huge one we pretty frequently talk about is allowing that inertia to give you some data, but then acting on the data. Such a big pitfall of challenger brands, especially when bandwidth is low, time is of the essence. Time maybe is not the resource that we have in abundance. It is very easy on certain channels in the advertising world to set it and forget it. To build a campaign trust that your algorithm is going to optimize for you, it’s going to do all of the things and allow it to just run in the background.

That is such a huge mistake that we see all of the time and something that we combat frequently that we have to be getting our hands dirty, hands on keyboards constantly in the platform making those optimizations. As soon as you get data, allowing it to inform your next moves, how do you ensure that every single dollar is working as hard as possible for you?

So making sure that you’re not wasting any dollars on any placements, any audiences, any geos, any devices, anything that is wasting money to make sure that you are performing within your campaigns as optimally as possible.

It is so important. I can’t overstate how important it is, and it’s a pretty common one that we see. The other side of that is you do have to balance that with allowing your algorithms to get enough data to make decisions, so making sure that you are not spreading your budgets too thin, making sure that you are not trying to test 45 things all at once. So allowing yourself to get a little bit of data to guide your next steps.

Greg Harbinson (00:15:28):

Critical piece there I guess is visibility into what your funnel looks like, so being able to have ready access to that data that’s coming in so that you can act based on it

Chalice Jones (00:15:41):

And with all that messaging and making sure that you’re not just spreading the message out there and making sure that you are, again, being precise with all that it is making the most out of your messaging and that consistency for the brand. If we’re being disjointed in what we’re communicating between our different marketing channels, then we’re really, again, potentially wasting money because we’re not creating this unified experience for a consumer.

Obviously we want to be strategic, we want to be targeted, especially today, everything needs to be customized, but having a strategic message, again across the board, across these different efforts really allows you to be able to create that almost surround found experience for a consumer, which is what’s going to make those gains happen and deepen that relationship and that experience with the brand, which is going to ultimately lead to those gains.

Josh Squires(00:16:39):

Something I’ve seen is a neglect of a thorough competitor analysis. I think just about every challenger brand has that one other brand that has the target on the back, that’s who they’re going after, that’s who they’re differentiating from, but they don’t do a great job surveying the landscape and that at least for search, and I think social to an extent, is a liability. They’re going to get caught off guard by something they didn’t know was there. They’re going to see a decrease in the efficacy of their messaging because somebody is either talking louder or talking first. And particularly in search, it’s kind of amazing to me how few people actually do the searches that they want their own audiences to take to see what shows up when they get there.

Numerous times we’ve done these searches ourselves as part of our daily routine and we’re seeing competitors, or I should say brands that the challenger brands don’t consider competitors. They’re maybe not even in the same industry, but they are taking up real estate and search. You appear in spot number three because there’s two other brands that you didn’t know were there that the search engine thinks are good answers for that result—even if they aren’t.

Knowing those things are there and figuring out how to adjust your messaging to unblock yourself and get those top positions, get that additional visibility is a really critical step.

Chalice Jones (00:18:04):

And I think it speaks to how the audience understands the brand too. If we’re just going through what Josh was saying, then we’re missing this opportunity again with connection with the audience and making sure that we are customizing it for them and making sure that they’re getting that full brand experience by not understanding the broader landscape, by not understanding…If we’re just looking at the competitors, we’re really making the opportunity to see how the consumer’s used to being communicated to what they’re used to curing as well as what they’re interested in and maybe how they’re behaving, which again gives us another great little kind of avenue to potentially get in with those smaller segments or, again, really be a challenger against potentially a bigger player.

Greg Harbinson (00:18:51):

Yeah, I think another piece, just to tie this point back up to the value proposition comment is for brands that maybe haven’t fully developed out their value prop or their messaging and they’re doing some of that competitor analysis, I think doing a search around what other companies are bidding on those types of terms is a great way—or have organic strategies around those terms—is a great way of starting to figure out does the market understand what you mean by the value proposition that you’re creating or is there so much noise around something else that’s the same keyword strategy that people won’t be able to readily identify you within that cloud?

It is not something that’s always appropriate, but it could signify a need for a change in your messaging strategy. Again, that can be a nice indicator maybe if you haven’t done a fleshed out audience research to understand the natural language of who you’re going after, it can be an indicator that you might need to go back to your audience on that just to get a little bit more understanding.

All right, two good discussion points. We’ve got a couple more to go. So we talked a lot about a balance and I think these next two questions are going to take us further into that. So if we think about needs that challenge your brands have, we’ve already talked about how there’s awareness gaps, there’s brand equity gaps, there’s lower funnel, just sheer sales gaps.

If we think about their market share, how do we think about how brand awareness and brand equity factor together? So how should challenge your brands consider approaching the market if they have no awareness or brand equity to kind of build off of what’s their starting point look like?

Balancing Brand Awareness and Equity

Laurin Bobo (00:20:49):

This is another place where audience becomes so crucial, especially in the digital space. So when we think about what historically were awareness buys, they were these big broad buys that were just hitting every single person in a particular moment of time. It was billboards on the side of the highway, it was television capturing somebody watching a live sporting event or the local news that night. It were these big broad buys that were just going for impressions these days, especially for a challenger brand, it is of the utmost importance to still be surgically precise with that audience when you’re doing these awareness buys.

So what that looks like in actuality, it’s instead of doing a large television buy to all of the local news stations in the area, it is instead going an audience first approach on connected television where you’re able to hit a very specific audience wherever they’re consuming content on connected television.

Same thing with streaming radio, rather than just hitting the local radio stations and every single person who’s ever possibly listening to those stations at a given point in time, you’re instead hitting people that are interested are in your market. They’re the certain job titles that are purchasing at the companies that you want to go after.

Whatever that looks like for your brand, you can hit these people where they are consuming content to still hit those awareness impressions without having as much waste as we used to in the past. This can even happen within digital out of home. It’s hitting people very specifically targeting where they are at, targeting the people that are most likely to be there by devices, hitting office buildings that we know the tenants are at.

So being very, very surgically precise to make sure that you’re not wasting impressions and not wasting dollars. That way you’re not wasting it competing with these larger brands. It’s being way more surgically precise in your digital buys to ensure that that targeting is there.

Josh Squires (00:22:47):

So you said waste and I think the other place I see it getting wasted is they do these really well thought out, strategic awareness buys and then they send them to the homepage, right? It’s such a miss and it’s only a miss because homepages are very rarely optimized to multiple messages, and this sort of starts to tie it all together. We just talked about consistency in messaging. Well, if your messaging is consistent across all your awareness buys, your homepage only needs to say one thing and poof, suddenly you’ve created efficiency where your competition does not have it and you can get even smarter, create smart landing pages.

You’re an eCommerce retailer, and you’re really trying to get some growth in a particular category. If you sell a bunch of different categories of products, maybe have messaging specific to one, make sure that the place your audiences end up matches the messaging that they’ve seen and make sure that you can convert them when they get there.

You don’t want to spend all of that money on awareness because what we typically see in the ecosystem is awareness generates a touch, they come to the website, they follow you on social, but then they don’t engage for a while, and sometimes it could be a few days, it could be a few months. Sometimes they don’t come back at all, right? And you got to spend more on awareness to bring them back. You have to do remarketing to try to pull them back in, but if you give them a really great experience and a really relevant experience right out of the gate, they’re going to be a whole lot stickier and you’re going to get more for your money.

Greg Harbinson (00:24:25):

Yeah, I mean that just speaks to understanding the customer journey. What is the entirety of that experience? What does that look like? And I mean, to be fair, a lot of incumbents have done this really well and that’s why they are where they are, but they don’t all do it really well. And I think one of the points that we kind of kicked around in our early discussions with this is in thinking about creating, maybe differentiating on the customer experiences, are there places where your target audience is underserved by that incumbent?

Maybe the incumbent is treating a larger market than you, which means it’s a more diluted market, which by way of that means maybe their value proposition and their experience is a little bit more diluted. There can be an in there if you think about sharper solution focused messaging. If you think about a less cluttered experience, maybe your site isn’t as large because it doesn’t have to account for as much content or user variations. It’s great ways to think about improving the experience there, but you have to be intentional from the beginning about how did we get them?

Where did we send them to? And then what are we going to do about that after the fact that starts to kind of tie all of those pieces together.

Chalice Jones (00:25:37):

I feel like there’s some really interesting ways to understand if there are some of those, again, gaps or opportunities to speak to somebody that’s maybe not getting the message in the same with the same kind of power that maybe some of those leading brands might be using things. I think one of the coolest things that we’ve done for some clients has been, again, using a tool like social listing, there’s lots of other ways you can do it as well, but just using this as an example, really understand what it is that your consumer’s talking about, not just what they’re saying about your brand.

It’s definitely a great use case of it, but when we’re trying to actually follow what your target consumer is, maybe talking about what their pain points are, what are the Reddit threads, what are the forums saying? What are the conversations and the questions that they’re asking to be able to have really not just looking at the trends of the broader zeitgeist, but rather what is this target group really?

What’s their current pain point? How do we create an experience and a touch point or a talking point or a solution that directly applies to that to capitalize upon those unique needs? It really, again, allowing the consumer to feel understood, heard that people buy solutions to their problems.

So when we really identify and connect with the problems that they’re having with consistency and with relevant timeliness, we’re able to, again, to what Josh is saying, have this really provide this great experience for them that reduces waste overall because we’ve already kind of snuck in there and then like, oh, we understand you.

Josh Squires (00:27:24):

I’m going to tack on just a tiny bit more because sort of touched on it, but we haven’t spoken directly to it. And I think that’s measurement and we tend to measure by platform, but as soon as there’s a platform handoff, right? As soon as somebody goes from social to the website, as soon as somebody goes from email to the website or from the website to email, suddenly that path gets broken off. And what we tend to find, especially at the bigger players, and this is where a challenger brand can break out and get an advantage, large businesses tend to be highly segmented internally. Marketing channels don’t talk to other marketing channels.

Everyone’s watching their own numbers and not paying attention to how they interact with the other channels. So again, following that user journey, being able to trace it end to end and find where the inefficiencies exist is much harder for them.

And if you start that habit early, if you build that into your company’s genetics, then you’re always going to be great at it. You’re always going to have fantastic insights and you’ll always know how to iterate and improve. And for a challenger brand iteration and improvement early on is one of your fastest paths to success. Find what doesn’t work, make it better, move on to the next.

And we see that a lot, particularly on the organic side because I think the perception is, well, organic is free, you spend some money on it, but it’s quote free, but you should be measuring ROI across all of your channels and you can’t measure that if you can’t see that. And one of the things I see is not just getting from platform to platform, but even onsite, being able to follow the user journey through the site end to end is a challenge for some folks.

And early brands aren’t going to have access to heavy duty reporting platforms. Some of the free stuff is even kind of hard to use. If you are someone on the call that had to live through the GA3 to GA4 transition, I feel your pain. None of it makes any sense, but we do the best can.

One of the best things you can do for yourself is have a smart website architecture. Keep it simple, but think about the data points that matter and build your site to match those data points. One of the best insights we get is being able to break things down by categories, subcategories, and see how user interaction differs between different sections of the site.

Chalice Jones (00:29:49):

And truly that thinking, again, is universal. What is the bigger kind of messaging and how do we break it down to become more specific, to speak to those individual kind of needs and build from there and connect with the individual points on the user journey? I think optimizing all of your locations, both from a holistic marketing view as well as your channel specific, right? For social, something we’ve been talking a lot about is really creating just in the same way we do across our marketing efforts, but how do we think about it when we’re looking at just the social platforms and that’s not just organic, that’s all of the components of it, the entire ecosystem.

What is it to become aware? What is it to consider? What is it to convert, what is it to retain loyalty, advocacy, et cetera. And so when we’re aligning there, we’re also able, I don’t know how many other social managers there might be on the call, but a common pain point that people have is again, that measurement that Josh was just saying is being able to prove out the ROI.

When we actually talk about how all of our marketing efforts and we streamlined the KPIs and the measurement and the success barometers across the board, then we’re not trying to constantly prove out why it’s valuable, but rather we’re seeing it as a strategic distribution channel and it’s really a lot more intentional. We can see that a lot more clearly because we’ve controlled it and set it up to be that way, set that way.

Greg Harbinson (00:31:22):

Alright, what else do we have on this one?

Chalice Jones (00:31:25):

I think the only other consideration that I kind want to bring in is this kind of piece of credibility as well, leveraging your audiences. I think again, when we’re thinking about when we have dollars to do something versus when we don’t, or maybe it’s just how many dollars, there’s so many different ways you can go about it, but we’ve talked about brand experience, user journey, and one of the things that can become a block for some people is I call it as consumers get smarter, our internal brain ad blockers that we have going on, we see it and we just can kind of snip it out at any point as consumers.

And so what are some of those ways to kind of permeate that without just maybe getting louder or more aggressive? And I think one of the things that we’ll leverage a lot that we’ve seen be so successful when we’re not just seeing it as a singular channel tactic, but how it impacts the entire marketing experience is using influencers and not just influencers in the traditional sense of I am compensating this individual to speak on my brand on behalf, but both your yes them, but also your internal influencers, your team, your staff, your experts, your SMEs, how do you put them up on a playing field and on a pedestal to really have that voice and give them a megaphone.

Because at the end of the day, whether it is something that you’re compensating to do it or it’s somebody internally, what you’re doing is again, putting a face to a problem, you’re creating a relationship and a connection.

And again, as we continually grow in our smarts as consumers, we really are looking for that authenticity—that’s like the buzzword of 2023, 2024—and forging those actual connections because there’s so many options out there. When we have somebody that actually makes us feel heard and understood that we resonate with or that we recognize ourselves in, we’re able to actually, again, make them in ways into those individuals. So it’s really helping with that, not just awareness, but building that equity with a brand through another individual.

Greg Harbinson (00:33:37):

I love the idea of using your internal experts to bridge that equity gap when you don’t have it for the brand yet. I think there’s a huge value in assessing back to our first question of what do you consider when you’re building a strategy, assess what you have in-house, what resources do you have in terms of expertise and I guess expertise in the field, but also just capabilities of creating content?

I think you hit on the authenticity piece a lot. I think finding ways of making those SMEs, the vehicle for your messaging can allow you to enter a new market with some kind of assumed credibility that maybe or authenticity and credibility that new brands don’t always get. It’s harder to earn that without proof. People who have their own credentials and expertise, they can help you get some of the shortcut to that path.

Chalice Jones (00:34:36):

And I think that it’s really important because for those marketers that are really vertical agnostic, you have to be able to consider that that’s something that consumers as a whole are looking for. So what is the version or the flavor of it that makes sense for your business? Yes, of course some of the beauty influencers isn’t going to make sense in your financial wellness category probably, but that doesn’t mean that authenticity connection and kind of that human personification of it isn’t going to not work for you.

Greg Harbinson (00:35:11):

So I often think of social and paid media when I think of influencers, but what about organic? How do those start to play a role in organic?

Josh Squires (00:35:21):

In organic, it’s more about what we would call thought leadership leader. So thinking through who’s got the best voice to articulate the things that matter to our audience in a visible and engaging way, something that feels authentic. Going back to the point about finding internal influencers, someone in your company has a voice and a good one and can articulate it. They know the business, they know the audience and they have feelings about what it is you do as a business. Find that person, even if they’re in the rough, polish ’em up, get ’em out there, get the messaging out. And there’s so many platforms to build off of. And I think a lot of folks want to start with blogs. I think that’s been traditional approach for close to two decades now. And most marketing agencies will come right out of the gate and say, well, you got to have a blog.

You don’t, you know what, you don’t all have to have blogs. Medium is a fantastic resource for that. LinkedIn articles, you can be really strategic, but pick a platform or two and be consistent and be visible. And again, targeting your audience. Content marketing is where most people drop the ball on thought leadership. And for a lot of brands, thought leadership is powerful enough that it is a thing that if you’re not pursuing it now, you probably will need to at some point because it becomes a big differentiator.

So making sure that you’re finding authentic people with authentic messages that line up with your value proposition. Be on visible platforms, be where your audience is, and then properly market that, start a newsletter, capture those emails and bump that content up via email or send it back out in social. Reshare it. These are valuable uses of your time that I think a lot of early stage companies pass up

Chalice Jones (00:37:25):

And I think that just, and Josh can probably speak about this more eloquently than I can, but even when you think about some of those foundational SEO principles of EVAT and really pushing that message board of expertise and authority awareness, right? Influencers and internal external, whatever that is, are great voices to have that, is that going to necessarily impact your SEO performance? There’s not been any, as far as I know, any direct kind of correlation about that yet.

There’s theories, et cetera, but it’s still about I think setting this really great scalable foundation for you of thinking that way of identifying that deeper. Again, connecting the expert to a person, whether that is again, in a social channel on your site and those same principles I think apply across the board.

Greg Harbinson (00:38:23):

So I guess we’re going to move on to our last prompt here. We’ve talked a lot about balance and decision making when you can’t do it all. I guess this last one in some senses feels like the biggest challenge to solve. We’ve talked about the funnel obviously to break it down to its most basic blocks. You’ve got awareness marketing, you’ve got demand gen, lead gen. How do challenge your brands start to prioritize one or the other when they need to do both? Where do we start with that?

Prioritizing Marketing Efforts with Limited Resources

Josh Squires (00:39:00):

I think we’ve sort of touched on it already. We, at least from my perspective, from my channel, it’s capturing that existing demand first, establishing a strong foundation. There’s always going to be a V1 of the product, the brand, the website, gain as much learning as you can, find the stuff that works and figure out how to amplify it and then work on revising, cleaning it up, making it more efficient from an organic perspective, this is super important.

We need to know what works and we need to drive positive engagement early in search, at least for Google, there’s a theory that there’s this sandbox period when you’re brand new, when there’s not enough information on the internet about you, Google will test you out and just see, do people like this? And nobody knows that this is real, but the data sure does look like it is.

You want to show Google the best side of you early, right? So making sure that you’ve got all your ducks in a row when you go live and that the pages that exist on the site are there to convert people who already see the value, who are your highest probability purchasers. And I think it’s kind of easy to shrug search off. I think social is so much more exciting and paid just makes a lot more sense to people, right? It’s concrete numbers. There was a study that came out just a couple of weeks ago. Search engines refer traffic to websites more than any other, anything else on the internet? I think it’s like 75% of all search traffic comes from search engine. 75% of all traffic to websites comes from search engine. That’s a lot, right?

That’s going back to ROI start there. That’s the largest audience. That’s your best shot. And if all you’re doing is building a website and focusing on that initial functionality and that you’re getting those sales early on, then you are already doing what you need for search and you’re building the strong foundation there. 10 years from now, that foundation is going to pay huge dividends.

Greg Harbinson (00:41:09):

Yeah, I guess I’ll just tack onto that. This is more of an audience specific comment, but search is obviously huge. Inarguably a really important channel for brands looking to enter a market. Social is creeping up with younger audiences.

 So in terms of where people go to get questions answered, if you look at Gen Z’s preferences, they’re going more to TikTok over search. YouTube is a huge channel for finding information. So I guess when we think about search, social is almost starting to get lumped within that conversation and that’s why Chalice, you mentioned earlier social-search earlier.

I mean it’s critical where your brand is being found or—not your brand, where people are going to find things related to your brand and that’s where you can plug yourself.

Chalice Jones (00:42:00):

Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s why we were talking about looking at the entire piece of it because if we’re just looking at it, as Josh mentioned internally, especially as marketing continues to become more and more segmented with very specific niches and specialties, we get really good at those things, but we lose sight of the bigger picture and understanding, again, that user journey and that people still need to, they’re looking it up and where they’re going to look it up is going to change over time or maybe start in different locations.

But if we have a solid foundation and alignment across the board, across all those channels, tactics, et cetera, we’re have kind of a search methodology or we know what people are searching for, so what are then the channels and the ways between SEO, social, even certain paid placements that we can be to answer those search questions. And so it’s not siloed. We have to be thinking about it again, audience first and not channel first.

Greg Harbinson (00:43:08):

So there’s a lot to do. We have to figure out what’s the most impactful. Lauren, do you have any thoughts?

Laurin Bobo (00:43:14):

Of course I do, Greg. My big thought here of course from the paid perspective is a test and learn approach. Start small, do some tests, learn some things, iterate, test again, learn more things. You can’t just come in when we talk about challenger brands, not just startups, any brand that’s having to outcompete somebody that’s much, much larger than them, it’s all about doing these small tests, especially mid and upper funnel, to figure out where there’s demand, where is their revenue, where is their conversions to be had? And then how do we scale from there? It’s the number one thing. It’s just like we talked about let the data talk to you, but you got to use the data, you got to test, you got to learn, you got to iterate.

Chalice Jones (00:43:59):

And between the different audience sizes, again, as sorry, the company sizes, the brand sizes, right, whether you’re a startup or you’re ginormous facing more ginormous, right? Very technical terms. But again, there’s so many ways to get in there and understand.

We kind of talked about some earlier between using something like social listing, but there’s also Laurin said hands on the keyboard, but that boots on the ground approach a little bit too with organic strategies of having brands or thought leaders or influencers on behalf of the brand, getting out and having conversations with their target audience in certain locations online, the different social conversations, complimentary brands, certain thought leaders in the space and having a say to be like, Hey, we also have something to say here and we have a specific POV. And that’s a great way to get that awareness going up and maximizing your dollars and your spend rather than only relying on increases of budget.

Greg Harbinson (00:45:13):

I think one of the pieces that’s really critical to build in from the beginning when you don’t know what’s going to be best is just a budget for testing, right? You’re going to have your best guess at what’s going to work, but like you said, we’re always fluid and it’s nice to have, nice to have a portion reserved for maybe we see that a piece of content worked really well and we’d like to do a follow up. It’s nice to go ahead and have that accounted for so that you can move swiftly while you’ve got the interest there. You can nurture your audience with that and try and drive those conversions quickly.

Laurin Bobo (00:45:50):

Well, and especially being comfortable with that testing budget, understanding that if we’re going to carve out this budget, let us test, it might fail, but that’s how we learn that something didn’t work and that’s how we learn where to go from here. We are going to get learnings from it. It’s something we talk about with our clients all the time that we’re going to turn on a test and you got to give us a little bit of time to figure out where the nuances are, where the learnings are.

We talked about pitfalls, but a pretty common pitfall is being very uncomfortable to turn something on and not see immediate ROI within 24 hours of turning something on. And that’s not always how it happens, especially if we’re talking about these more awareness buys where we do need to build up some brand equity. We’re not going to immediately see sales from something super upper funnel.

So carving out a specific testing budget and aligning on a KPI for that is so huge. Agreeing with your stakeholders, agreeing, thank you for the visual here, agreeing upon what are we measuring each of the different stages of the funnel and then holding ourselves to that. That way we don’t launch a massive CTV buy targeting our varied niche specific audiences and expect them to perform exactly the way branded search would or launching an organic social buy that’s maybe meant to drive a little bit more brand equity, kind of get the word out a little bit more and not expect it to perform exactly the same way that our down funnel campaigns would.

 So carving out that testing budget, carving out a budget, agreeing upon KPIs with everybody involved, not just you, but every stakeholder that’s going to talk about this. Josh, we talked about it a minute ago, all the different marketing teams that all have their own numbers, their own budgets, their own KPIs, but getting everybody to agree on what we’re chasing after at each stage of the funnel and how we’re measuring each individual thing is pretty key to being able to measure success and iterate tests and get better and better.

Josh Squires (00:47:49):

Something folks could consider too is testing in one platform, testing in one channel can yield learnings that you can use in other channels, right?

Laurin Bobo (00:48:00):

Absolutely.

Josh Squires (00:48:02):

We use that a lot in SEO. If I want to optimize for click-through rates in search, I want to go to paid and see what messaging is getting the highest click-through rates and help me craft better titles to get that higher click-through rate in search, figuring out where messaging resonates, where it doesn’t, and then figuring out how to cross pollinate. Again, something that non mega brands have an opportunity to do where these giant corporations are going to struggle because every department is three miles deep and 10 inches wide.

They don’t talk to each other, they don’t cross pollinate well and where they do it tends to be at really specific points in time. Any of the large in-house teams I’ve worked on, there’s usually some sort of quarterly sit down with marketing where everyone talks and meets. If your opponents are meeting once a quarter and your team is meeting every single day once a week, that’s an opportunity, right? Those learnings have readouts on tests with the entire marketing team and see what ideas get sparked.

Chalice Jones (00:49:10):

Yeah, definitely that sharing of learning is so important and I think such an undertapped kind of treasure trove, it’s such a great opportunity because we all have different things that we are able to optimize against, and because of that, we can get certain learnings faster than some certain channels can get different learnings bigger than others.

I love to use the example of with organic social, we’re turning out so much content all the time, but all there’s of different messaging and there’s usually a little bit less pressure on each piece of content because we are turning up so much we can kind of do that test and learn so much quicker. So while it might not be a true direct ab test, we get these learnings and these insights that allow us to be like, Hey, did you guys know that actually this thing is crushing it right now? This might be a really great opportunity for us to get this out with some other channels and see how that’s resonating on a potentially more a heavier investment area.

Laurin Bobo (00:50:14):

Well, part of that agility, and it’s part of the beauty of when you get a squad like the three of us, when we get to work on an account together, the nimbleness and the agility that comes when we can all share our learnings is unmatched.

Key Takeaways

Greg Harbinson (00:50:32):

So this has been a fantastic discussion. We’re not quite done yet. I want to run through some takeaways and then we’ll answer just a couple quick questions. So a few things that I heard here as we’re thinking about this, and I guess one of the pieces I want to make sure we hit on is that challenger brands can be essentially any company. It doesn’t matter, even if you’ve got more market share, if you’re getting outspent by another brand in your category, maybe you’re just getting outspent on one channel, maybe you’re getting outspent holistically across the board, good things to keep in mind. So number one, identify those really specific high propensity audiences, a great way to maximize your return ratio. Number two, building out that clear value prop and your content strategy. So kind of laser focused around what words, what types of audiences get us the best return, the most amount of revenue.

Number three kind of blends those together. We don’t want to waste our money elsewhere, at least not in the immediate present. We want to make sure that we are focusing those dollars on the stuff that’s going to get us the most back. However little caveat there, it is critical to have a long lens on it. What happens when you start to generate that groundswell?

What’s the next tactic that you layer on? How do you start to expand your marketing campaign once you’ve started to see some of that growth? Number four, measurement structure to look at your full funnel health. So as we’re thinking about this plays into the next point too, as we’re thinking about a balance between upper funnel and lower funnel. If we think about a balance between how much we can spend versus what we need to do organically, it’s important to have visibility into the data across the funnel.

Again, that’s how you see what’s working. That’s how you see if your test is working. That’s how you see where you need to start to respond and focus your efforts a bit more. And then lastly, we talked a little bit about influencers and how they touch a lot of these different paid and organic channels. It’s a great way, especially if you’re lacking in equity, authenticity, credibility within a space. Influencers are a great way for you to start to tap into some of that established equity and credibility. And keep in mind that those influencers aren’t always outside your organization. Sometimes they can be your own employees. So I hope I captured that pretty well from the rest of you guys.

Q&A Session

Greg Harbinson (00:53:05):

I guess now we want to open it up just to answer a couple of quick questions. So number one, got it up on my screen here. What tools or methods can I use to identify a hyper-targeted audience category most likely to buy? So I think there’s a lot of ways that this starts to represent itself, but Lauren, I’m going to go to you first with this one and the rest of you guys can chime in.

Laurin Bobo (00:53:33):

Definitely. Thanks, Greg. Definitely the kind of data that you’re looking for are things like in market signals, these audience signals that are propensity, a new mover audience depending on your industry, lots of different tools that are out there. There’s some social listening. We’ve got some partners that we partner with to get that sort of data.

But also taking your first party data and modeling it out is a lot of the value that some of our clients get from our exact audience science platform to take kind of those propensity signals, those in-market signals based on what people are browsing on the internet, what kind of content they’re consuming, what actions they’re taking in the real world, where they’re swiping their credit cards, all those different signals, what locations they are visiting are really where to focus in that. And partnering with somebody like Amif can be a great tool to use that audience science technique.

Josh Squires (00:54:28):

On the search side, we’re a little more old school and it’s a very hands-on approach, but I think it is super transparent. We’re looking exactly for what people are typing into search and keyword research tools have been around forever. There’s a billion of them now. Some folks might recognize names like SEM, rush or hres. There’s plenty out there. They all do it slightly differently. But really you just want to start looking at what people are searching. So if you’re selling Nike’s, drop Nike in the search box, in the keyword research tool and see what kinds of questions come up. More and more tools now have a filter that actually finds questions that people type as opposed to just keywords. So the tools actually now filter that list for you and then take the time to look for what looks like somebody who’s ready to buy.

Is this a question I would ask if I am trying to narrow down my options to make a purchase? And usually the signifier is more words in the question, more modifiers specifically, am I looking for black Nikes? Black Nikes in a size 13? The more detail in the query, the more likely they are to buy. And that’s really the easiest path.

You can get the same data out of paid keywords reports. We do that all the time. I personally love to match the two and where I have paid data on some of these search terms, compare, click-through rates and then look at my organic click-through rates for the same keywords on our website and see what’s the difference there. Where can I find some efficiencies that maybe don’t exist? I talked about optimizing title tags, pace in point right there. Do we have great messaging in our PPC, but it’s not so great on our page title tags and we just need to dust that up. Great way to find direct insight and find the exact thing people are searching for.

Chalice Jones (00:56:31):

And then just to kind of last thing on that I think would be also looking at the broader to what Lauren was saying too about understanding where are they, what are they looking at? And also what questions do they have?

What’s the intersection of those things and how do we then maybe listen in on those conversations that people are having to again, be able to more quickly identify real time pain points that the consumer is having using tools like social listening as well as manual or just being present on the platforms. There’s so many tools out there now, but really listening not just to what they’re talking about in regards to your brand, but also their broader pain points for them as consumers and finding unique creative ways to marry those two things together.

Greg Harbinson (00:57:16):

I think we’ve got time for one more, Chalice. I’m going to throw this next one to you. So we talked about balance, we talked about measurement and thinking about the funnel. As brands are thinking about how they evaluate the success between upper-funnel, mid-, lower-funnel, what are some of those metrics that we find most meaningful?

Chalice Jones (00:57:35):

Yeah, so I think the most meaningful thing overall is alignment by channel. And I know that’s not a direct answer to your question, but making sure that across your channels, we all know what it means for us to what our awareness metrics we’re gauging against. So we can say, we got to do a big awareness push. Everyone’s going for recent impressions. These are broad strokes, but understanding that, and while it might feel simple, most of the time we might not be operating that way.

We’re gauging our success very differently and optimizing toward what we’re being held to. And that’s going to create a lot of discrepancy between those opportunities for efficiency and optimization. And so that alignment’s really important. And then mapping those really to the consumer funnel as well. The consumer journey. Where in their journey are they going to be these different stages? How does our content align with that and how do we map that to each of the channels and what that means for them specifically? I know it wasn’t a spot on answer to your question, that’s what I would, no, it needs

Greg Harbinson (00:58:38):

Better ability to interpret the data as it’s consistently compared across platform.

Chalice Jones (00:58:44):

And as it suits what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than saying, this is what the metric is for this effort, this is what we’re trying to accomplish. This is how going to define success, and everyone’s going to be marching to the same beat at the same job.

Greg Harbinson (00:58:58):

Yeah. Anyone else have thoughts before I wrap this up?

Josh Squires (00:59:03):

Yeah. We’ll throw out some hard metrics. I definitely spend a lot of time looking at hard metrics for upper and middle funnel content, for lack of a better term. Upper funnel is awareness, but awareness is useless if you can’t reengage. So we want to look for metrics that are going to be some sort of signifier that we’ve earned. The ability to reengage this person, getting them on site.

We want to look for site interaction signals. Adobe and Google Analytics both have an engaged visits, metric percent engaged visits, those sorts of things. And what they really do is they sort of combine a couple of different things like bounce rate and time on site. And those are useful, right? If somebody hits the site leaves three seconds later, that wasn’t a meaningful engagement, right? We’re not really getting traction there. But if somebody comes and hangs out for 30 seconds to a minute, they probably read some stuff.

They might’ve scrolled the page a little bit. But really you want to focus on getting some concrete action things like a video play and getting them to watch more than half of the video, getting them to submit an email so you actually have a method to get back in touch with them.

Looking for some sort of interest signifier, and then calculating what percent of our visitors are actually engaging with us with the things we need them to do, and keeping track of that. And I think that’s relevant for both the upper and mid funnel, right? You want to create an action on the site that allows you to either reengage with them or further engage with them.

Greg Harbinson (01:00:38):

Yeah. No, that’s a good point. Thank you all for your thoughts. I know we’re right up here on the hour. Thank you to our panelists for joining this discussion and weighing in with your expertise, but also all of you who attended. Want to thank you guys for joining us?

Just a reminder, this was recorded. It will be sent out after the fact, so you’ll get this if you want to go back through and look at anything you missed. I guess with that, I guess we’ll wrap up the discussion, but thank you again for everyone. I hope you join us for our next one.

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