Better Manage Your Budget This Year
Esther Flammer shares her insights on how to better manage your budget this year, ways to be smarter with your resources, and how to boost your marketing efficiency.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
Today, we are joined by a very special guest,
a return guest, Esther, how are you?
I'm doing fantastic. How about you, Ian?
I'm doing great, excited to have you back on the show,
new job, we've got all sorts of things going on,
we got new world that we're living in, lots of fun stuff.
Let's get into it.
First off, how's the new gig?
Tell us about what you're up to now.
Absolutely. Yes. I've been at Rike for,
I guess, a year and a half now.
It's been a wild ride going into a new company.
We've had some acquisition happening, we've had growth,
we've had lots of things going on,
but overall, going really well,
I'm driving business strategy and leading
a global marketing organization across corporate marketing,
product marketing and go-to-market strategy,
digital, demand, operations and BDRs and SDRs across the globe.
We are basically actively trying to help people
do the best work of their lives.
It seems like we are trying to do the best work of our lives
at this point and trying to drive as much value
for the business as we can.
Today, we're going to,
it's doing a little bit of a different episode.
Since we've already done one of these with Esther,
you can go back and listen to that episode
and hear some of her tips and tricks
and uncutable budget items and all that stuff.
In the previous one, we'll link it up with the show notes.
And for today, we're going to talk about this mandate
that we all have right now, which is do more with less.
This is the same thing that we hear over and over again.
Every CMO we talk to, every marketer we talk to,
they have to do more with less.
And Esther, obviously, this is something that you're hearing
a lot from yourself and your peers
'cause you brought it up to us before this.
How are you dealing with this mandate of do more with less?
- Yeah, it's an interesting time.
I feel like that's what we've been saying
for the last four years.
(laughs)
Marketing has had to innovate and get ahead of everything,
all of the issues with global pandemics and remote work
and then hybrid work, great resignation,
as well as all of the things that are happening
with the Coquilis world,
having to get in front of buyers
who are buying differently, saturated markets,
and all while having to reduce spends and resources
and deliver more brands, deliver more leads,
deliver more pipeline and revenue.
And so a marketer's job is never done.
(laughs)
I think the last four years have been challenging
for everyone, absolutely.
I would say for marketers, especially,
we had to very quickly adapt in a pandemic world
with different channels, taking off everything
that was in person, switching to digital,
having to deal with hybrid workforces,
having to deal with burnout and people who were changing jobs
and still having to produce and overproduce.
And I'm saying also just pivots in terms of marketing,
really having to drive strategy,
not just in terms of lead and revenue generation
and brand, but also doing more when it comes
to sales activation, doing more in terms of go-to-market,
doing more in terms of market positioning,
doing more in terms of product roadmap
and development and innovation.
We really are at the crux of everything
that drives a business forward.
Now there's an increasing pressure
and every single marketer I talk to,
every single CMO I talk to,
is in the same position with just increasing pressure
of budget cuts, resource cuts,
but at the same time deliver just as much, if not more.
And there's always that trifecta that I always talk about,
which is you want more leads, you want better leads
and you wanna do it at a lower cost.
Of marketers' jobs never done,
but that's why we're in the business, right?
That's why we're in marketing
and so that we can solve all these problems.
- And more, solve all these problems and more.
I think it's a great point.
We saw one of the statistics that like 70,
79% of marketers' budgets are either,
they're gonna stay the same or increase a little bit,
which I think is an interesting step
because I think that sort of doesn't tell
the full picture of do more with less.
If the budget increases by a dollar,
A, that's an increase, and B,
if the pipeline number is twice as big
and the budget stays the same,
you have to do way more with less.
And I think that that is the new normal
when we created the show on the first point
of to hear how CMOs think about demand.
And you're truly a demand-gen visionary.
You're someone who grew up in demand,
had responsibilities in demand, you're now CMO.
And I'm curious, like, what is demand specifically role
in this do more with less?
Because it seems to me that demand
would be one of the last things that you cut,
if you have to cut your marketing budget.
How do you think about that?
- I would say that oftentimes,
especially if you're looking at overall marketing cuts,
which I would say oftentimes marketing is the first to be cut,
largely because we do have a good amount of spend.
And if you're not able to showcase the ROI
or build a good business case on why every dollar
that you're spending is producing ROI
or is helping move the business forward,
it's going to be cut.
And so I would say overall marketers,
and I think that is a surprising stat,
that 80% of marketers are seeing flat
or maybe even slightly growing budgets,
I would actually be interested to see,
if that poll were taken today,
as people are planning out 2023
with kind of the macro economic conditions
that are in place now, if that still holds true.
When marketers are faced with budget cuts overall,
typically what they will protect is demand-gen.
And oftentimes, it's the first to be cut,
will be thinking of like brand
or anything that doesn't have maybe a direct correlation
to revenue or pipeline.
Similarly, other types,
there are certain types of channels
that I know every marketer is really starting
to look at whether that's channels
or just line items within their budget on what would I cut?
What's, and it's funny
'cause you do have that question oftentimes in your podcast,
which is most uncutable line item in your budget.
And I would say typically demand still holds true,
but you do look at line item by line item,
channel by channel of what's producing, what's not.
If you were to cut,
would have the minimum risk to the business
into pipeline and revenue goals.
And for every business, it's a little bit different,
but I'm seeing a lot of cuts, for example,
just across the board, but for events, for example,
where oftentimes there are lots of residual costs,
not just obviously event sponsorship,
but also the T&E and the production.
And just all of that goes into in-person events
and people aren't necessarily seeing direct correlation
to ROI, so that's something that would get cut.
And again, every marketer I know
is literally going through this as we speak.
Yeah, I think that there's marketing budget costs
that don't drive revenue.
And so you think of your sales kick off as something.
I know a CMO Palomine had a absolute astronomically expensive
SKO that was planned, and she was like,
this ain't happening, like A, why is this all a bit
in my budget, but B is a marketing.
- Yeah, I was like, that's a weird line item.
(laughs)
That's typically not marketing.
Especially if you're looking at a joint revenue budget,
and it's like you have to send a bunch
of marketing people out there, they all have to pitch,
they have to be room and board and all that other stuff.
It ends up being a bunch of different things there.
But there are certain types of things that,
like you said in a big event sponsorship
where you get to cut out all the T&E,
that there are certain things there that just don't fit.
That could be those types of things.
Another thing that we were just talking on the episode
before this about how big companies sometimes,
there are a lot of times it's headcount
and smaller companies that might be more of
sponsored dollars or advertising or things like that.
I'm just curious when you deal with those type of things,
when a CFO comes to you and says,
we need to make a cut about your ad dollars,
how do you put your arms around and say, no, not this?
- Yeah, and again, I think it goes into making sure
that you have the data that backs it up.
I feel like in an era of grow at all costs,
where there was maybe less examination
and down to the dollar of everything,
where maybe you're spending on things like swag,
maybe you're spending on things like large scale events.
And now I think things have really shifted
to now it is about efficiency in addition to growth.
And so as you're looking at every single line item
in the budget or trying to defend budget
for specific areas, it really does come down to,
okay, that's fine.
We can see maybe a 30% cut to this channel.
However, here's what the actual result or output will be
is can we potentially optimize that channel?
And that's what we're going through, right?
Which is if we were to cut by 30%,
can we optimize that channel enough
to potentially see less of an impact to leads and to revenue?
And then how do you balance that?
Where it's not always a one to one,
it's not 30% hit to that budget item,
30% hit to revenue, maybe it's a 30% hit to this specific channel.
And maybe it's only a 12% hit to lead,
which then convert into revenue
based off of this conversion rate.
So it really is this whole scientific approach
and analysis to really being able to justify
every single dollar and every single channel and say,
we can cut here, here's what the impact will be.
But if we cut in this specific channel,
like you said, like advertising, for example,
here's what that impact will be.
And are we willing to make that risk?
Are we willing to cut that, right?
In terms of direct line to revenue or impact to brand
or impact to customer experience or whatever it is,
that is the objective of that spend.
It's always a balance where look,
I'm willing to give up on this,
but I can't cut this because this will impact our bottom line.
- I think it's really tough to do that crisis planning
as a CMO to say, here are our tiers.
And if I need to cut again in Q1,
if I need to cut again at the end of Q2
and like doing those things
because we plan a year, multiple years out, right?
Like we don't have our exact line item budgets planned out
four years out, but we try to think in the future,
despite the whatever the 18 month tenure of the CMO,
we try to plan beyond that.
We plant trees so that others can sit in the shade
in marketing, but we try to do that.
But when cut off one of the legs of the stool,
you're like, yeah, but that fit,
that was integrated into what we were doing.
It's like it won't stand anymore.
- Absolutely.
And that's where marketing is not an exact science
where the board and the executives and everyone,
all of your stakeholders want to see
that direct correlation where if here's a dollar spent
and here's a dollar gain, right?
Or more, right?
Two, three, five dollars gains for a specific channel,
but we know that's not how buyers buy
and that's not how marketing works.
It is multiple touch points,
not necessarily trackable touch points of,
I saw your billboard and then I purchased.
And so that is where, again,
you do have to bring the data, it just can't be.
This is just how things work.
You can bring the data in terms of,
we know that if we cut on brand spend
for paid search keywords,
we actually see an impact to traffic
and we actually see an impact to leads regardless.
And so being able to produce some of the data
and the scenarios around,
we know that we've invested in branded keywords
and we know that we've seen the same uplift
in terms of traffic, which then converts to leads,
which then converts to revenue
and being able to do some level of just education, right?
As well as being able to quantify the impact,
but also understanding it's not a perfect science.
And so doing micro tests, doing experiments of,
okay, well, if we shut this off,
here's what this is gonna look like,
what's the impact and are there other things that we can do?
Are there other optimizations, other channels,
testing, messaging, content,
those kinds of things that could potentially be able to
get to the place we're mitigating that risk.
- You always hear CMOs talk about that 10% experimental
budget, which might be experiential,
but for those experiments that they wanna run,
obviously, this is a place where you could just say,
there's my 10% that I got a cut and lop that off.
I'm curious, how do you think about experimentation
and making sure that you reserve some of those funds
so that you can do experiments?
- I guess I haven't really allocated certain budget
for experimentation because I am of the opinion
that we're constantly optimizing
and you always have to optimize and experiment
within each of your channels.
Absolutely, there's budgets set aside
for maybe net new channels that you want to experiment
and maybe that's what you're specifically talking through.
I still allocate some level,
even if it's this very small amount,
it's not something I'm willing to cut.
And largely because you always have to be experimenting.
And you always have to be looking for
what are new ways to get in front of your buyers?
What are new channels that we haven't tested yet
that if we just put a little bit of time and effort into,
we can see and prove if that's something
that is worthwhile for our business
because things are constantly changing.
There's always new channels popping up.
There's always new messages, new ways,
a new buying mentality and methodology.
And so to me, it's not something you can just cut
and it's not a practice that I would ever stop,
especially as a marketer where you're constantly changing
and you're constantly having to innovate.
Yeah, I think that's the tough part
is 'cause when you talk to the finance folks
and they say, "Well, show me the ROI of that thing."
And you're like, "The whole point of this
is to determine what the ROI could be."
This is something where it's like, it could be 10,
it could be two, it could be negative,
it could be flushing money down the drain.
And when you're working in a resource constraint environment,
it's even more important to do things like that
because it could return tons of efficiency
back to the business.
Then the breaks when you're in a competitive environment,
you were talking about earlier
how being in a really competitive environment,
we've all seen the explosion of technology
and options and the stuff that everyone has.
If you're kind of just doing what everyone else is doing,
we all have the same access to LinkedIn AdWords
and to Google Ads and to all these things
and to all these paid channels.
We have access to sponsoring the same events.
We have the access to spending money in very similar ways.
I'm curious, like, how do you think about differentiating
your marketing, getting your team to think more creatively
about how you go to market in ways to find new avenues?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And that is the name of the game
when you are in a very saturated market
or a highly competitive market.
For us, a lot of it is about messaging
and just unique differentiation.
That what is it that we can do as a company,
as a solution, as a product that no one else can do?
What is our sweet spot?
Where do we shine and how do we create that messaging
that really can connect those dots very clearly?
And so to me, it really does very much boil down to messaging
in a lot of ways, right?
Because the pain points are often similar, right?
When you're targeting various personas or audiences
and so really hitting home.
And that's something that we've talked through a lot,
which is oftentimes differentiation is really built
into kind of the bottom of the funnel
in terms of sales enablement.
And once you get into a deal,
you really give a lot of that ammunition,
the battle cards to your salespeople
so that they can go and win the deal.
But we talk a lot about actually
that differentiation has to be pulled up
to the top of the funnel
because you have to be able to very clearly differentiate
early on.
But beyond that, absolutely,
there's a lot of various creativity and innovation
and new channels of how do you get in front of audiences
that your competitors aren't getting in front of?
And that goes back to that testing methodology,
which is constantly be looking and doing analysis
on what is it that they're doing,
constantly be doing research and analysis of your audiences
and figuring out what are some of those areas
where you can get maybe more grassroots, organic,
maybe you can get more credibility through influencing.
There's so many different channels and opportunities
to get in front of your buyer.
And then what do we know specifically about our buyers
and then how do we get in and either create an outlet
to get to them or invest in certain channels
to be able to get in front of them
before your competitors do?
- Yeah, we were talking with the CMOs offline,
talking to CMO the other day
and they were saying how one of the areas
for opportunity that they saw was one specific vertical
that they do really well in
that a bunch of revenue comes from.
And they were like,
we're just gonna go own this vertical, right?
We're gonna stop spreading so much money across
these five verticals and we're gonna go
way deeper on this one because we know
that we can just win here.
And those are the sort of creative things.
That's, say it's like wildly outside the box,
that's pretty outside the box thinking, right?
To say, hey, same amount of money,
I'm gonna go deep on this.
- Yeah, you absolutely have to do that.
And especially when you're in a high growth type of company
and this is what I've seen with a lot of my companies
in the past is high growth, lots of opportunity
and you can literally be everything to everyone,
but you don't wanna be because that creates too much
to spend, like you're spread too thin,
you can't do anything well
and it's really hard to dominate a certain market.
So absolutely going after very specific buying centers
or verticals, right?
Figuring out what is that segment of your target market?
Because oftentimes you're talking about your TAM,
you're talking about your total dressable market
and it is, it's huge, but there are very specific nuances
of how do you cut down a cohort of,
absolutely this is your sweet spot
and here's where you should dominate
and potentially it's where your market
your competitors haven't gone, right?
It's untapped market potential
and you do have differentiation,
you have product market fit, right?
You can create messaging that clearly delineates that
and go after them before anyone else does.
That's absolutely what, right did as part of one of our buyer
percenters in marketing and we actually went after marketing
pretty hard years ago before a lot of our competitors do
and it's still a huge buying persona for us.
- Any other stuff on Do More With Less
or any of the strategic pieces of that
or any other sort of tactical pieces within Do More
or Less that you'd recommend that CMO
or marketing leader does for the end of the year
and early next year?
- Yeah, absolutely.
We've talked a lot about the budget issues, right?
And just the ROI component,
which is you always have to get to that level
of obviously business justification for every dollar
but also, right?
As you're thinking about Do More or Less
that has to do with resources as well as ways
to really streamline the work that's being done.
A lot of what I talk about with marketers
is the fact that we're getting resource constrained
in a sense, right?
And with kind of the Do More With Less
and a lot of ways actually, again, the name of the game
with marketing is like you really never have enough resources
to do everything that you wanna do
which means you have to be smarter
about the resources that you have.
But also at the same time, there's just a lot of repeat
of the workflows that happen within marketing
in terms of how do you get a campaign out the door?
How do you then type to the ROI?
How do you actually be able,
how do you get to a place where you can actually understand
what's working, what's not, what resources you have?
Where are they working?
All of the optimizations within an organization.
And so we talked a lot about that as well
because if you don't have an efficient marketing engine,
not just from a campaign standpoint
but also a work management standpoint
as you're getting campaigns out the door,
you feel more of that pressure and more of that stress
and more of just the complexity to trying go fast
but with less resources.
So we talked about that a lot as just a big, just theme
and a big, compounding pressure that marketers feel
of just the stress of having to manage
all of these different cross-functional teams
within your marketing organization, getting alignment
which is always huge, not just within marketing
so that there's, do we have the same level of focus?
Do we have the same priorities
between your creative team or your content team
or your product marketing team?
There's lots of assets coming, not only for marketing
but for sales and products.
All right, there's always more to do
and so how can you become more efficient
within your organization?
And again, as I said, efficiency is the big thing
of the day, right?
Where every marketer, every marketing organization
is having to showcase efficiencies
and that's just another piece of it is
how do you get your team to be productive
and to be efficient and to be able to move faster
and produce better work?
One of our other podcasts, Rise of RevOps,
we talk to revenue operations leaders
and one of the things that's super interesting
about their role in this process
which is part marketing, part bean counter, part sales,
part technologists, which is a really interesting thing
in this resource constrained environment
which is figuring out the ground truth of these,
of what is actually happening and what has been happening
and be able to say, hey, yeah, this channel is
a little bit better.
Curious like, how do you think about investing in those,
like whether it's marketing operations or revenue ops
or things like that?
Operations in my mind is absolutely critical and central
to especially a demand-gen marketers ability
to be able to move forward.
I actually, the way that I think through
just no general marketing organization
is there's corporate marketing
and this is how I have my team structure
and how I have structured my teams in the past
is the appropriate marketing that really is focused on,
that general messaging and positioning of who you are
as a company out in the market, out in the industry
and that really has that, the finger on the pulse of
how do we position ourselves as an organization,
as a company out there, as a brand.
That then feeds into your product marketing
or go-to-market organization
which really does take that approach
of very specific audience segments, verticals, right,
buying centers and really understands
from a market analysis standpoint,
where do we win, what's our sweet spot
and then how do we bring our solutions to market
and then that then feeds into your demand-gen,
your digital organizations or performance organizations
that are distributing against the channels
and generating leads and pipeline
and then you actually have marketing operations
as that core foundation in infrastructure
or revenue operations because you need to have the systems
and the infrastructure for scalability
and obviously all of the working components
of being able to deliver on those campaigns
and to align all of your processes and workflows
but then also the data component
which is what's working, what's not, right,
making sure that you have all of your
multi-channel attribution in place
to be able to pull all the reports that you need
to understand down to the granular level
of right time, right channel, right message, right person,
right place, all of those things
to really optimize the whole engine.
- Kind of switching gears a little bit here
toward your career and after been in the seat
for a little while coming into this next year,
how you grown as a CMO, what's some of the stuff
that you're like, I've really hit my stride on
with some of the stuff that you're working on?
- There's always growth
and always growth opportunities.
From me, I think I've absolutely grown
in my ability to be able to work
as a both kind of a strategy driver
within the entire organization
but also activating that strategy.
And I just talked about the way I structure my team
and a lot of that kind of general foundation
does really play into the rest of the organization
and you have to be able to partner and align
at every single level with all of the different stakeholders
whether that's product, sales, CS, engineering
and development, HR, legal, finance,
I mean, literally every part of the organization,
you have to be a good partner with
and you have to basically understand
what is it about marketing and then my counterpart,
our stakeholders, how do we work together
to drive the business forward?
And so I think making sure that you're getting out of that
just pure marketing mindset
and because we've talked about,
I've grown up in demand gen,
really focused on revenue generation
but understanding how does that play out across marketing?
First of all, because again, you all need each other
to make sure that you're driving revenue
and it's not always just about demand gen
that's driving revenue although usually
your neck is on the line to produce,
here's what the revenue looks like
but you absolutely need corporate marketing
you need marketing operations,
you need product marketing,
they all have to work in conjunction together
and at the same time you also have to have that
across an organization.
You have everyone knows about sales and marketing alignment
that's absolutely critical
but CS and alignment is absolutely critical as well
especially now in the era of Do More With Less,
a ton of companies are now focusing on their customer base
because the cost of new customer acquisition
is getting to be too high,
you're pulling back, you're focusing on your customers
where they're already, you don't have that cost to acquire
and you can focus on expansion.
So there's huge components there
as well as customer lifecycle, customer advocacy,
customer adoption that marketing should be a part of,
there's product innovation and roadmap
where oftentimes I've seen product development
and product management owns the roadmap
and all of the market research and analysis
around how do we innovate but again,
that should be done in conjunction with marketing
'cause we should have our finger on the pulse
of what's happening within our audiences
and within the market and the industry at large
and then how does that actually then work together
for product innovation and again,
messaging and differentiation?
I mean, there's just, there's a lot of components there
in terms of really being a good partner
and then together driving strategy.
- I know that we've already done some uncuttable stuff
but I have to ask you,
what are some of your uncuttable budget items
going forward for next year?
- Yeah, and I know we talked about this and again,
every business is a little different
and so when I answered this question,
when I was at Kanga, you know,
I talked a lot about ABM because that was a huge driver
for big deals and also just the premise of ABM
of going really targeted, understanding your sweet spot
and then making sure you're getting in front
of every single buyer in that sweet spot
in a really multi-channel way still holds true.
I would say the RIC, go-to-market model
is very highly dependent on inbound and inbound trials
where we're generating a substantial amount,
like tens of thousands of trials a month
and trials are fantastic.
They're every sales person's dream
because basically you not only have a buyer ready lead
but they are actually in the product utilizing it
and seeing what they can do with your solution
and so that's fantastic model.
And so some of the drivers of that,
those inbound trials are really gonna be around
buyer ready types of leads who are searching
for project management, right?
Or for work management.
And so paid search is obviously huge for us
as well as listings, people who are buyer ready
are looking for a solution.
So those are probably some of the more uncutable budget items
but I say that also with a little bit of a grain of salt
because they're also quite expensive.
And so again, our constant need to optimize those channels
and to look at every single message, every single keyword,
all of the optimizations that we can potentially do
within those inbound digital channels.
It's a huge focus for us.
- Well, you know, and you touched on this a bunch
but like your total addressable market is absolutely massive.
So this is where you feel like, of course, marketing
could never get a big enough budget
'cause you're like, yeah, we have so many people to go after
and so many different people that could use our product
and benefit from it that like, yeah,
there's a lot of stuff to be done, which is exciting
but probably a little daunting.
- Yeah, and again, everyone has finite budget, right?
It's no longer just deep pockets everywhere you go, right?
And it doesn't matter where you're spending,
it is absolutely finite budget.
And so you have to be smart about where you're utilizing that.
So even though paid search is a huge channel for us,
it doesn't mean that we can just spend whatever we need
from cost of acquisition standpoint to get a buyer ready lead.
We have to be really smart about where we're spending,
who we're targeting, what kind of leads that we're getting,
all leads are created a little bit differently.
And so we have to make sure that we're really optimized
towards those audiences that we care the most about.
- Any other thoughts on uncuttable budget items
or stuff that you're cutting or anything like that?
And then we talked a lot about budget.
- I know, we have talked a lot about budget.
(laughs)
- It's so top of mind, it's budget season, everybody's budgeting
and we're all nervous about budgets and I don't know,
it's just every time I talk to finance folks
that are shivered down my neck.
- Yeah, and again, this is why it's so important
as a demand gen marketer to just to make sure
that you have, again, that really good infrastructure
and understanding of what's working and what's not
to be able to justify.
And that's basic marketing and basic demand gen
is you always need to be able to justify your spend.
Now, when push comes to shove
and you're really having to justify every dollar,
it counts even more, it's so much more important.
We definitely take this next year with a,
let's absolutely, every month, every week, every month,
every quarter, improve and get better
and showcase the optimizations that we're doing
and the efficiencies that we're making
and what we're able to produce
and we've been hugely successful actually
in cutting our budgets even now,
but yet still maintaining volume
and actually improving on quality.
It's actually, I think, a fantastic exercise.
I know everyone feels a lot of the pressure of it,
but it is getting back to the root of,
we are marketers, this is what we are supposed to do,
is not just grow at all costs and spend wherever we want
and create lots of fun things, which we should be doing,
but at the same time, we really do need to really think about,
I only have this much budget or this many resources.
Let's be smart about where we're doing it.
Let's showcase the value,
let's showcase what we're doing and prove out the ROI
and prove out the growth and then you get more, right?
There's appetite to invest, absolutely.
There's still money out there, absolutely, right?
If you can prove it, there will like more will come, right?
If you build it, people will come type of thing.
I think it's the same kind of premise,
which is prove out that you can do a great job with less
and then you can get more later
or you can build at least business cases
to say, "Hey, we spent a million here.
"Here's what we got, we doubled ROI or tripled ROI."
There will be people, right?
Like it will be much easier for you to continue
and grow and scale than if you didn't have that
as a justification.
- You recently presented a pretty fun presentation
about how to measure creativity.
I'm just curious, creativity is so important.
We talked about it a bunch on this episode.
How do you measure creativity and drive creativity
on your team?
- It's a good question,
because I think it is difficult to measure creativity
necessarily right and again in the spirit of ROI
and experimentation as we've been talking through.
We should always be doing creative testing, AB testing,
because it is critical to our ability to see conversions
and see if channels and campaigns are producing.
And so from me, it is, how do we make sure
that we do have the infrastructure and the process in place
to be able to do really good AB testing and quick pivots
based off of things that we've learned?
I think that's an important component
with any sort of experiment, right?
Hey, we have a crazy new idea to go put this on the website
or to put this campaign out the door.
What are we actually gonna get out of it, right?
And create a baseline and then basically do an experiment
and see basically based off of those measures, right?
What do we actually improve?
Do we improve open rights?
Did we improve click through rights?
Did we improve lead generation
and then revenue generation?
That constant impact of measuring that creativity
kind of across every campaign,
every program that you're running.
I think that's probably some of the main ways
that we measure creativity.
And I think where it's important to continue to make sure
that you're leaving that space and pushing your teams
to constantly be thinking maybe a little bit differently
outside the box, making space for brainstorming
and ideating on what are some new things
that we could potentially do that gets people.
It gets buyers attention in a new way.
That's a challenge just because everything
that we're doing is oftentimes just so saturated
in terms of buyer consumption.
Being open to those new ideas, leaving space
for the innovation and the brainstorming and creativity
and then putting in the right process in place
so that you can actually test to see,
hey, did that thing that we tried, did it work?
All right, let's get to our quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how qualified helps companies
generate pipeline faster, tap into your greatest asset,
your website to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly start sales conversations.
Quick and easy, just like these questions,
go to qualified.com to learn more.
It's qualified.com.
Quick hits, Esther, are you ready?
Sorry. (laughs)
Number one, if you could make any animal any size,
what animal would it be and what size would it be?
Tiny elephant, the size of a duck.
(laughs)
First of all, I think it's our most popular answer.
I like that he said a size of a duck.
Is that a popular answer?
Everybody what likes to make elephants tiny?
That's my answer.
I want a tiny elephant.
Are you kidding?
That would be adorable.
If we brought you back one year from now,
what's one thing do you think that has changed?
Hopefully, (laughs)
I hope, right, that do more with less
and the budget ROI emphasis, but I'm guessing not.
(laughs)
What else?
I think there will probably be a lot more conversation
around just new innovations around
like the cookie list tracking, those kinds of things
and those kinds of strategies.
Any book or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out?
A lot of them, I'm like thinking about each one.
The last book I read was "Verity"
and that's just a fun like fiction.
It's not like a business book.
Podcast, I'm trying to remember the name of it.
All right, no, you know what, Saster,
I think was the last podcast.
Oh yeah, sure.
Yeah, but I was listening to.
Well, that's it, Esther, this has been awesome.
It's so great to chat with you,
have you back on the show, so many insights.
We'll have to have you back again soon.
Always great to chat.
For our listeners, go to checkoutrike.com
to learn more, tools for marketers to productivity.
It's the name of the game.
We just talked about productivity for like an hour.
So be more productive, check it out.
Esther, any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Again, best work of your life.
Ryke will help you do that.
Thanks for having me.
And it's always a pleasure.
I love talking about marketing strategy and ROI.
There's always more to talk about.
So thanks, thanks, appreciate the questions
and the conversation.
Indeed.
All right, thanks again and we'll talk soon.
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