The job of a growth marketer is to educate the C-suite on all of the marketing actions and the effectiveness of those actions on the customer.
Things like:
- What’s going on with the growth of customers across the company?
- Are current customers happy?
- Can we make current customers happier?
- Can we fill the conversion funnel with new users that look like our happy customers?
- Can we segment our CRM file and leverage that data?
For years, advertising in walled gardens has been automatic, and an assumed strategy because every other marketer is doing those things, but are those tactics driving growth, or are they just navigational tactics with engorged budgets?
It’s much more productive to start with programmatic advertising first –
- Define exactly who to reach using third-party and first-party data.
- Specific audiences you can target behaviorally, demographically, and geographically.
- Reach and frequency against all audiences, channels, and devices.
Susan Vobejda, ex CMO at TheTradeDesk (and also ex CMO at Tory Birch), says, “and [as a growth marketer], if I do that as my first investment I can rest easy because I am reaching those core audiences with my message and then I can add a little social and little search budget down the funnel just to make sure I am getting visibility in those channels, but that’s a very minor percent in my marketing plan, and it’s just so much more efficient to do it that way.”
Starting at the top of the funnel, with the right audience, is the strategic, smart way to spend your ad dollars, and the challenge for many CMO’s these days is convincing the C-suite to make the marketing investment. But the investment will drive growth. It’s proven.
Just listen to the king of growth himself – Jeff Green, who founded TheTradeDesk – “The reason the bulk of the majority of the surface area is at the top of the funnel is also the same reason the majority of the dollars are there – is that it’s more expensive and more important to create awareness and to win hearts and minds.”
“It doesn’t mean that it’s not critical to convert, but we are living in a unique era where people are trying to turn the conversion funnel into a cylinder and saying ‘I just want to advertise to the people who are going to convert’ and when you do it that way – you cannot grow.”
Not to mention, in a time where marketers can measure programmatic activity across the open internet using multi-touch attribution tools, there’s no excuse regarding why more investment isn’t being put toward the top of the funnel.
If you have questions about programmatic budget allocation, please reach out to us.