How Do You Scale Content Campaigns to $1 Million a Month? What's Your ROAS?

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Heyman.

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He is the CEO of Digicom, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow through digital marketing.

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Welcome to the show.

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Eric, thanks for having me on.

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Very excited to be on today.

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Appreciate you making the time.

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So, before we jump into your story about some of the best marketing you've done, why don't you just give us a couple of minutes of context about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, so my name is Hemant again.

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I'm the CEO and founder of Digicom.

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I've been in college for my father and running some Google ads through watching YouTube and then from there I guess the rest was history.

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I've worked at American Express running marketing for the Platinum Program, worked on Wall Street for Jim Cramer where I was his head of growth at thestreetcom, then went into consulting and I've worked with a ton of hyper growth startups, very much playing this startup space and the goal is to drive profitable growth.

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That's awesome.

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I'm a fan of Jim Cramer in the street, so that's very cool, and I think you had shared with me that you've managed over $100 million of marketing spend and driven over $500 million in sales for that for your clients.

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Is that about right?

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Yeah, managed a ton of media through a number of different ad platforms.

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Of course you have Meta and you have Google, but also Outbrain, taboola, youtube, yahoo, yeah, all kind of skill set ranges the gamut.

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And here in 2024, what is it like to run a digital marketing agency?

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We live in interesting times and I've seen you've been out there.

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You went to CES, you went to the big Shopify event.

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You're out there hustling.

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What's your impression as we're heading into the second quarter here in 2024?

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What's it like to be running an agency in these times?

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Yeah, I think the big question is what is attribution right?

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All of us here are marketers and we're using different tools and technology.

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And with iOS changes and cookie deprecation, how are we going to continue tracking?

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And so a lot of what we've been doing is a lot of custom modeling.

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We work hand in hand with Triple Whale.

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We take their data, marry it with our client data to understand what a profitability point is for our partners.

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And also there's a giant shift in especially the startup space right, when we went from growth at all costs grow, spend all this money to like, hey, what is profitability?

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How do we build a profitable business and how can we scale that profitable business?

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And those are a couple big shifts, I think, that are occurring in the industry and it's going to happen, I think, at a much more accelerated rate, especially once we hit the summertime and we start seeing cookie deprecation.

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Yeah, I think things are evolving in interesting ways and I agree about attribution.

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Getting fingerprints on the weapon is pretty important, right, knowing what's working, how well it's working, because everything directionally works.

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But which channels work better is really the $100 million question, right and things are happening to does the product or service make sense for this specific channel.

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And my example for that is there's all of these marketers out there with products that they are trying to jam into TikTok and they're spending some time, some energy, and the product might just not just might not make sense for the platform.

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And so we're moving from this product market fit to product channel fit, and this has been occurring over the last three, four years.

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Product channel fit.

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That's interesting.

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I hadn't heard that phrase before, but it makes a lot of sense, because I think TikTok has its strengths, but that doesn't mean that every product makes sense for TikTok, like you're saying.

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That's an interesting way of thinking about it.

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Yeah, exactly, and just like we're always thinking about our audience and maybe their personas, is that audience on that ad platform and, if they are, what is the size of that audience?

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It might be tiny If you have, let's say, we're testing like a anti-age serum on TikTok.

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Yes, there are folks that are 30 plus on there, but a lot of the user base is under 30.

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Just thinking through what we're testing and why we're testing is very important.

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And you do a lot of work with e-commerce websites direct to consumer right.

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Yes, predominantly focusing on the e-commerce D2C space.

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Any trends in 2024 in e-commerce that are noteworthy, that you've gathered from clients and from going to the Shopify event.

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Yeah, I think we've been on the shift already.

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I'm sure you've had other folks on talking about the importance of creative, but I want to take it a step further.

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It's the importance of data-driven creative, and what do I mean by that?

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You're running all these ads.

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How are you tagging the creatives?

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Are you tagging the color of the background?

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Are you tagging that this is UGC or a branded element?

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And how are you pivoting that data to then come back with insights and say this is the subcategories that are working, and here's how I'm going to use this to inform future creatives, versus a lot of brands that I am speaking to are throwing things against the wall and trying to like jam things and hope for a miracle.

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But I think if we just take a step back and go back to the what am I testing and why and what is the like KPI that is most important and how am I pulling this data out.

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It's a lot of work, but once you have that in a rinse and repeat cycle, you can you can drive a ton of growth.

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Yeah, very interesting.

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So why don't you jump in and go ahead and share a story about some of the marketing you've done that you're most proud of?

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Sure.

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So I worked with a few years ago and they started working with fairly not large budgets when I say not large for a company of that size, not large, somewhere between, say, $20,000 to $30,000 of media spend.

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And for this specific campaign style, we ran something called content campaigns.

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So imagine you're taking the affiliate model, which is creating an article about a brand, who they are, what they do, why you need them, and then within that article you have links embedded that you're able to track driving users to your client's website and you can drive conversions.

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We scaled that program and we myself and a colleague of mine, kira we scaled that program from 25K a month to over a million dollars and spend a month in maybe nine months.

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And we didn't just test one content piece, and when.

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A content in this, in this context, is the articles.

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We tested so many different angles.

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Right, I use the, I use Babel myself, so I wrote a lot of articles about my experience, we wrote comparison, we wrote skeptical angles and each of these content pieces worked very different in all of the different parts of the funnel and over time, we of course, hit the CPA targets we needed to for the program and we were able to scale and scale and scale, and that was definitely one of my favorite experiences in terms of like testing and learning, because the testing and learning also didn't just happen on one platform.

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It wasn't just meta.

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We were managing meta.

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We were managing outbrain, there was taboola, there was pinterest, we were managing so many different ad platforms, quora and the goal here was to educate users and drive awareness, but educate users about why Babbel's services and products were so great and then also drive conversion.

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Typically as a growth marketer, we're looking at everything from a performance basis, but we also ran lift studies and recall studies on these content style campaigns.

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That, in turn, helped with awareness as well.

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Yes, we hit the CPA target, but there was also so much more education and awareness happening because of these styles of campaigns a really remarkable ramp up of taking it from 25,000 to investing over a million dollars, and I assume that the ramp up there happened because you were delivering results.

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Something like for every dollar they were putting in, they were getting $5 back, right?

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Is that directionally?

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Is the average you've been able to achieve for your clients, right?

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I assume some campaigns are better and some are a little bit less, but is that directionally what you were able to achieve?

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I would say directionally.

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It's more that we were hitting the CPA targets.

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We were at or below it and because they're a subscription business, they very much have a lot of cohort analysis and they run off of LTVs.

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As long as each channel had a specific CPA target that we were hitting, we were able to scale.

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That's awesome.

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That's great.

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That's what winning looks like, right.

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Yeah, there were a lot of learnings along the way and, just like you mentioned, there are campaigns that are going to win and there are campaigns that aren't going to perform well and for us it's very much breaking down the funnel Average.

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If click-through rates are X and conversion rates are Y and content click-out rates are Z, where are we compared to the media buying price of each part of the funnel?

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And if one part of the funnel is not working, say it's content click-out rate, where do you go from that content piece to the landing page?

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How do we improve that?

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What tests can we enable in that piece of content?

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Because we might also have a secondary KPI where people are spending time reading that specific content.

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A lot of learnings went into it, a lot of testing but ultimately drove a pretty large program.

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Wait, are you saying everything you touch doesn't turn to gold magically?

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It's a lot of hard work, right.

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Hope is you get to target as fast as possible, but sometimes it takes a few months.

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It takes learning, it takes understanding.

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Is AOV high enough to support these CPMs and if it's not, then how do we bundle products together so that we can get AOV high enough for the CPMs and hit a profitability metric?

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It's a lot of math.

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A lot of maths, absolutely so.

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Is that the hardest part about what you do, or are there other things that make it hard?

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I wouldn't say it's the hardest part.

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For me it's definitely the most enjoyable part Looking through trends definitely like a data nerd, and I would say our team we're just, we're a bunch of data nerds and we've been building out a lot more creative capabilities.

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I think the hard part is for the creative folks on our team to think with a quantitative mindset and for the quant folks on the team to think with a creative mindset.

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It's always this push and pull that I've been experiencing over the years.

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Yeah, it's a balancing act, for sure.

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So final thoughts.

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I think the first piece of advice I would give is and I would ask this question do you know your breakeven ROAS?

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And the reason why that is important is there's an unbelievable amount of marketers or founders that don't know that they understand their profit margins.

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Maybe they're great at their P&Ls, but once you put media into it, what is that breakeven point?

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And once you have that number, then you can build all of your plans and it's a lot easier to go to market.

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Or for brands that are launching your North Star, all of your plans and it's a lot easier to go to market.

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Or for brands that are launching your North Star goal of you need to get to the break-even point and then get to profitability.

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Absolutely.

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I think having that North Star is really critical.

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Thank you very much for sharing your story and these insights and advice.

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Appreciate it.

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Encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends so that they can get these ideas.

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I'm going to link to your LinkedIn and your agency's website in the show notes so everyone can easily get there and learn more about what you're doing and connect with you if they want to learn more.