Recently Tommy Chang, our Managing Partner, and Kreativa Group was featured in Authority Magazine discussing five ways to manage your marketing budget for better ROI.
Here are some of our favorite excerpts:
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Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?
Obsession. Being obsessed with and driven to achieve and go beyond the goals. Whether it’s growing sales by 500% YoY or improving ROAS by 25% MoM, I’ve always been obsessed with goals and achieving those goals for the organizations that I worked for and the clients that we partner with. Besides implementing a good strategy, and doing the actual work, I’ve built out various custom dashboards to monitor the data daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly.
Curiosity. From an early age, I’ve been curious about how things work, whether it be my Dad’s mechanical watch or Google’s machine learning bid algorithms. I like to tear things apart and understand how things work inside. Once I understand that, the rest is easy. I spend 30 minutes to an hour nightly reading, learning, and staying curious.
Emotional intelligence. Admittedly I wasn’t always as emphatic, self-aware, or kind, as I try to be now. It’s been a journey that began with realizing that I need to be better, improve myself, and how my words and actions impact others around me, especially those that I care for. Through this journey, I’ve discovered a renewed drive for positivity, personal growth, and a strong desire to give back to others.
I view life as a privilege. It’s a privilege to meet with my business partner daily and work with her to build our agency. It’s a privilege to do good work for our clients. It’s a privilege to be interviewed for Authority Magazine. This viewpoint allows me to stay focused, be positive, and do my best work.
I start my day with a brief meditation session, thinking about the goals for today. I end the day with spending a few minutes to reflect — what could I have done better today? What can I improve upon tomorrow?
What factors do you consider when allocating your marketing budget across different channels and tactics?
As Kreativa Group mostly focuses on direct response consumer campaigns, we consider these top three factors:
1 — Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Which channels and campaigns are producing the best and worst ROAS? By being laser focused on this, we’ve been able to spend more efficiently, even less in some instances, while increasing revenue profitably.
2 — Scalability. Look at which channels and campaigns have the ability to scale effectively and efficiently through historical data. Find the point of diminishing returns, scale to that, and optimize the campaign to push beyond so you can continue to scale as efficiently as possible.
3 — Looking beyond the data. I don’t make a move unless the data tells me to. But sometimes, there’s more to the story than just the numbers. How does brand awareness and customer growth factor in? What other goals and factors are at play? Learn to adapt to changing goals. Sometimes it’s a quick sprint for growth at any cost, sometimes it’s trying to be as efficient as possible even at the expense of growth. Most of the time, it’s just growing efficiently. So, look at the data and at the full picture to know what levers to push and pull.
Can you please share five things marketing leaders should do to improve the ROI of their marketing efforts?
1. Be ready to adapt and evolve on the fly. Business, as is life, is about evolution and adapting to ever changing circumstances and environments. We’ve pivoted our business a few times over the past few months already in response to market conditions and client needs.
2. Always be testing! You should be constantly testing something. At any given moment, we’re testing ad copy, creative, new campaign strategies, landing pages, even the colors of our CTA buttons. If you aren’t testing, you aren’t winning.
3. View marketing holistically. Marketing is much more than the sum of its parts. A user that begins their journey via Google Ads, may end up converting days, even weeks later via direct load. They were prompted to return to your website to purchase from an email they received a few days before. They signed up to receive emails from that Facebook retargeting campaign that you’re running after their first visit from Google Ads. The point is that you should be looking at the entire user journey and attribution cycle.
4. Avoid overreacting to negative data points. So, you’re running an A/B test and things aren’t looking good after the first few hours. Don’t panic, it’s OK. Avoid that instant knee jerk reaction and continue testing. If it ultimately fails, it’s still fine. At least, you’ve learned something that you can use going forward. You can’t succeed unless you fail first.
5. Be kind to your team and agency partners. We believe in kindness and prefer working with and collaborating with team members that have a high EQ. Teams who have high EQ members are almost always more successful in the long term, which translates into more sales and better ROI.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
We strive to make our world a much better place than how we found it through the power of positivity. Positivity breeds happiness and success. And laugh a lot. It’s contagious.
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You can read more of Tommy’s interview with Authority Magazine here: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/tommy-chang-of-kreativa-group-5-ways-to-manage-your-marketing-budget-for-improved-roi-69b72153936c
