TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, brands, year, working, bit, agency, tick tock, talk, good, podcast, running, platform, shop, ads, call, green bay, marketing, dtc, rolling, give
SPEAKERS
Matt Froehlich, Mariah Parsons
Mariah Parsons 00:05
Greetings and welcome to retention Chronicles, the podcast with learnings from expert e commerce brands and partners. I'm your host, Ryan Parsons. If you're here, you're either on a quest for ecommerce enlightenment, or you accidentally clicked the wrong link. Either way, I am thrilled you stumbled into our corner of the internet. And I hope you'll stick around. We've got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you're running a multimillion dollar business, or simply just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Before we unleash the brilliance of today's guest, let's give a shout out to our podcast sponsor Malomo. Malomo is so much more than just another Shopify app, their post purchase wizards making beautiful and branded order tracking smoother than a jazz solo. So our amazing founders, like our guests can keep their customers happy and up to date while they track their orders. So hit that subscribe button, like it'll increase your LTV overnight, and go listen to her other episodes. Echo malomo.com That's gomalomo.com Get ready for insights chuckles and perhaps a profound realization or two with this newest episode of retention. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to your attention Chronicles psyched for this episode here today. Matt, thank you so much for joining a little bit of background for our audience members. We met at shop talk this past year. So we're recording in late March or late May and we met in late March. So it's been about two months. And a quick months of that of quick couple of months with that. So excited to have you on thank you for making the time and I'm gonna pass the mic over to you to give an intro and say hi to our audience.
Matt Froehlich 01:50
Yeah, thanks. Awesome, like meeting you in shop talk. And then like just recapping our events like holy, that seems like last week, and then all sudden I fit in the wheelies there in April. And then when we found out that we were both podcasters it just seemed it may it made a lot of sense to hop on something a little bit more marketing related. I usually do things packers related, living in Green Bay here but yeah, when I can cross over something a little bit more strategic in career driven. It makes a lot of sense. So happy to be here. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 02:23
I love it. Give your podcast a shout out for those who are also sports fanatics.
Matt Froehlich 02:28
Yeah, packet a podcast 365 days a year an episode comes out right now we are in like the OTAs. So like 90, the 90 team rosters here in Green Bay Monday this week. That was rookies came in. So yeah, check out pack of a podcast if you're a Packers fan. A lot of great people that work on it and any support on any of the platforms where you have already subscribed, please do so. And you can follow me on Twitter if you want to. I'm sure I'll plug it at some point but at Matt underscore freight underscore that's at mA TT underscore fra underscore, but 90% football takes 10% work. So if you need that balance, feel free.
Mariah Parsons 03:07
You still get a little bit of it a little bit a little bit. The
Matt Froehlich 03:11
engagement though is just terrible. When I'm talking about DTC stuff media buying my audiences like what the hell is this guy even talking about? We're looking for like Did someone hacked your account? I have no clue. I have no concept. It's hilarious.
Mariah Parsons 03:23
I love it. Love it so much. Okay, so shop talk. I can't even remember honestly, God if I gave a recap ago. Yeah. Long time ago. But my overall take was this year was I just got to meet a lot of people outside of our normal partners, which was great. So I don't know if you have a semblance for I mean, comparing chalk talk in the wheelies because I haven't gone to the wheelies. But like a brief boilerplate of how would you kind of break down the two like comparisons? Because I know the Wally is is, you know, they have their award component of it, their recognition component, so how would you you know, if someone if one of your listeners on your podcast listeners was trying to understand and wasn't in the DTC world, what would you kind of tell them to, I guess, give them a summary of both conferences.
Matt Froehlich 04:18
It's a good framing. So they're very different, like I, I expected it to be some parallels, I would say the biggest parallel was just like, the happy hour in the social aspects of what came along. But like, once in Las Vegas, so you're basically Uber everywhere. I like to walk a lot of places. So that's kind of out of the realm. We're in New York City, I was able to do a little bit more. Shop Talk in Vegas, I was with three people that I work with. Our CEO, CEO and VP of partnerships in New York City was on my own thankfully they happen to that rotation because I would have been there with not knowing anyone. So I met some really awesome people through shop talk that you and I also had met And I was able to link up with that and kind of ride their coattails a little bit, you know, hey, I'm going to be at this event. Okay, me too cool, I have someone to connect with. But like, as far as the event goes, shop talk was basically a whole week, the wheelies were like, two days, maybe a day and a half if you really kind of boil it down. And I would say, that talk, I didn't go to the event, per se, we were kind of on the peripheral or I had met you a little bit more. Where our CEO and CEO went into those like higher, higher level conversations to pay to beat to pay to play be about conversations. But I would say equally, like, just fascinating the people you meet along the way, like I met at one point in a elevator, read the name of the shoe Palace, I think it is the VP of like marketing there. I ended up talking to him real quick in an elevator like I have a friend in Green Bay that's really really into sneakers, but also is a artists that like repurposing the boxes and makes art out of them. So like, that's him his IG elevator conversation See you later. And I think they ended up connecting. So just like the environment you're in on both events, and like, even in New York meeting these people that are just like, oh, I follow you on Twitter for a long time we interact and it's like, okay, yeah, we're like on the same page, both going through the challenges traveling all of this. And I would say they're very different, but definitely had like their small little pockets of like still finding people in the industry that you normally wouldn't be able to see come across, and you recognize them through Twitter, or podcast or some seminar they've done and it's just cool to connect. But yeah, being able to be one in Las Vegas with my whole team. And then like New York City, on my own was kind of a cool adventure and just navigating that city on my own navigating from Newark Airport to basically getting out of Penn Station, which I didn't even realize was underneath Madison Square Garden was a whole other thing. But that was good. My fiancee, thankfully, she lived in New York City for like four or five years. So she was able to give me the cliffnotes on how to get around and stuff. But it was fun. It was a great time. And they go by so fast and come home with all this new energy and these new connections. And diving right back in is is always a fun challenge. But rewarding.
Mariah Parsons 07:06
Yes. Yeah. I love that. I, I think I mentioned to you that I'm from New Jersey, born and raised there. So those are my old stomping grounds, the Newark Airport and going into going into the city and taking the trade and all that all that fun, fun stuff that you get to unravel. While you're while you're there. Also wanted to ask because this is a little bit more of a opinionated question. But you had physical business cards, which a lot of people don't carry around these days. So what's your take? Just real quick on like, I think pineapple is the app that people can use, right that you can quickly share information. A lot of people obviously do this social media connections versus having a physical business card. So what's your what's your take? What was your inspiration for bringing those to the conferences,
Matt Froehlich 07:56
I've evolved honestly not even evolved, it's kind of like goes in like swings like peaks and valleys. So like when I started finally getting into more of a career based role, like in marketing years and years ago, like physical business cards were more of a thing in Green Bay, like smaller agency, and I had them just to have them. But when we went to shop talk Lolita, our CEO was like, Hey, I got you a bunch of business cards, because like, I know, you're gonna want to connect with people on Twitter or LinkedIn, but like, just having those as important. And I thought, it definitely paid off. I feel like because there was a few evenings where they got long days, and all of a sudden, you're meeting up with people. And I remember like, a happy hour, we were at like, across from the Bellagio. And there's a ton of people on our patio on the deck. And I was like, business cards are flying around. I'm like, that's great, because at least I can wake up in the morning be like, I follow this person on Twitter. Here's the business card has cut, or if I forgotten and it slipped into my wallet, I could go back on it. I kind of think it's necessary to have both. I think that my favorite thing was like, I kind of default. Here's my card. What's your LinkedIn? Let me follow you there. So it's like a couple of touch points. And I think that kind of goes back to just like marketing in general, like multiple touchpoints to get people connected. I'm very bad at like, I follow someone on Twitter, completely forget that we're connected until I go and do like kind of like an audit of my Twitter follows. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's right. I didn't connect with this person. And I shouldn't be DMing them. So if there's a couple different points, I think it helps a ton and some people don't maybe follow on LinkedIn and Twitter and they don't really post so this be kind of become a part of your your follower list without knowing so yeah, I don't know. I think the it's cool to like pass out the business cards, but I know definitely some of those just get left behind thrown in the trash. Hey, I'm leaving my hotel room. They're not coming with me. So as long as you have a couple of different variations. I think it's important. But as much as I like to evolve and adapt with those things like you talked about Papo and a couple different apps that are out there. There's something about like a physical business card. It's still kind of feels good. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 09:51
yep, yep. Okay, I love it. I feel like that's something that a lot of people try and wait, you know, try and decide if like physical business As cars versus virtual ones that I like the in between just having them both so you can cover cover multiple touch points. Okay, now we'll dive into more of the E commerce side of things. So thank you for entertaining my conference questions, because it is conference season right now on E commerce first half of the year, you know, and then everyone feels like everyone goes into hibernation for for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, perhaps in the second half of the year. So give a quick summary or like a boilerplate of your background how you arrived at Eastar? Yeah, give give our listeners a little background. You've mentioned you know, your marketing experience. I think it helps contextualize before we jump into more of a strategy discussion.
Matt Froehlich 10:44
Great question. So I graduated from college like 10 years ago, and I thought I was gonna get into like broadcasting, radio, TV production did all the internships in college campus television, campus radio, had some internships in town with some sports, like, like little one off TV channels back in the day. And it was like my last semester, and I'm like, Man, I really don't want to go run a camera or work at a radio station for like 25k a year because the job I was working at at Sherwin Williams working 40 hours, I was making more money doing that I'm like, I'll just stick with that. So kind of found myself in this, like, went to school for something, didn't really apply it. I'm sure I'm the only person that's ever done that in the existence of academia and got done. And after a while, I was like, okay, like, this hasn't worked out. This hasn't worked out kind of need to lean into it. And I just found myself, having pushed my own marketing, personal branding, Twitter, LinkedIn, pushing some of my own podcast, packing a podcast, helping with some marketing channels there. And had built just by pure enjoyment and creativity, my own following and at least how to do social organic marketing. And the things that I enjoyed to do so I was like, oh, shoot, I should go get paid for this and ended up losing my job. I was actually in Germany at the time and visiting my brother. And I saw an email come in about a company that was hiring in Green Bay, I was familiar with them applied, I think we got back from Germany and had an interview with them and ended up landing the job end of January of 2026 weeks later, as I'm getting into this new role. Here, you're gonna work from home. Now I'm like, Okay, this is interesting. And we have like six of us so didn't really ever have to do in virtual meetings. We needed to have a meeting, we're all in the office regularly. And like that definitely was like my first like, marketing job, helping with sales, helping onboard clients kind of just like drinking from a firehose, and then it was exponentially worse, because six, seven weeks later, we're working from home and wasn't a big enough company to have to know how to deal with that. So after a while, worked there for about two years was looking for a change found a new agency that reached out to me, actually out of Appleton, and which is about 30 minutes south of Green Bay, called homestead studio, pretty well known in the industry, they've worked with a lot of big brands. And it was kind of like one of these things where I started working there. And I just never knew there was in an environment or an agency like that around the area. And it just seems so unique to like, just going into the office. And just like this is such a unique vibe from where I came from. My first agency role to even other jobs I've had to like this is more of like a cutting edge. Young people that work for different agencies, people are from outside of the zip code, let alone the state and worked there for a while. And then all of a sudden, I got reached out on LinkedIn again, Lolita had reached out had a conversation with them will basically have a conversation with anyone for 30 minutes, whether it's recorded or not, and took the job there wanted to take a little bit more of a level up within my career. And I've been at each store since about August. And it's been great. Been able to do a lot of things, a lot of travel, doing some partnership activations as well, which is kind of where we've crossed over and it's been a journey but um, I would say even just to tighten up that answer, First agency was more like b2b, small local budgets very very small to getting in the DTC world there's homestead an eve star and like seeing that has been opened my eyes up to like, wow, I can actually see what I'm doing on a L seven l 1430. day window instead of like, this long tail working with a manufacturer you're like, did anything we do in the last nine months actually give you any more business? I don't know. But my social media calendar was filled out good, that's good. So it's been fun. It's you know, it's stressful because you're seeing money in money out what that looks like. But it's also a lot more rewarding. And I think it's, it's, as Jonathan said to me, yesterday, we run through a conversation goes, it's a luxury, it's a blessing to have stress. I'm like, Okay, that's cool. I like that. So that's kind of the evolution so been in marketing for about a little over four years, but half of that's been the DTC space. Love
Mariah Parsons 14:56
it. Okay. That's a very good summary. This is why it's so fun for me to interview Do another podcast of each and it's rare that we, you know, we get to have those who either have their own podcasts or frequent podcasts. Usually it's the other side where someone for the first time joining, they've never been on a podcast before. So that was a great synopsis of your background. And so let's dive into kind of what you're focusing at Yeastar, as I've shared with you about this podcast when we first met, and recently, we like to try and make our specialty our partnerships arm of the podcast as tactical as we can get so that brands that listen, they can, you know, go and enact this strategy today if they wanted to. So I give the microphone to you metaphorically of take the floor and tell us about one strategy that you think is helpful for merchants to enact in 2024.
Matt Froehlich 15:50
Yeah, I would say the biggest thing we've kind of observed over HTTPS after Black Friday, it seems like overall, it's, it's always great to have worked for different agency in the b2c space, or even like, not just working, you know, there's balances everything like working in house for a brand is great. You get to laser focus. But working for an agency is great, because you have not only your book of business, five to eight brands, but you have the entire one and you can really look and be like, Okay, this isn't just a Eastar issue, or this isn't just XYZ product issue, this is across and I would say the last two black Friday's a little bit underwhelming. That's not even for our agency, we've had a few brands that have done really, really well. But even at my old agency, like looking back and talking to some friends that are still there, you can be like, Okay, this is an industry wide thing that's going on. So I would say we kind of took that into inventory. And just like just being more effective with spend, like really That's it, we had a lot of brands that we cleaned up their tech stack a little bit tried to get more efficient with their email and retention sends, I would say even there's a couple brands, actually every brand as we wrap up five months about probably ran every single brand, I've been on ransom cost caps within meta, just to get more efficient with their spend. Because there's a lot of bloat that can happen and spend you forget, at times, I would say early on when I started, it's like, oh, I am running someone else's money. And that was even with like, a couple $100 A month budget. And now you go back out and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm spending all of this money. And if I were just a little bit more tactful with it a little bit more efficient, like that extra $20 $50 a day, 500 hours a day, 600 hours, it can add up over time if you're not being a little bit tighter. So just overall efficiency, we've tried to clean up tech stacks for for brands, which is difficult because there's a lot of brands that sign up for stuff. Forget about it, that free trial turns into a subscription, that subscription turns into your contract. Why are you even using this, so like just kind of diving in rolling your sleeves a little little bit with them, has been important. And again, just overall efficiency if we are pushing them again, like the big thing within an agency, and there's so many different variables, but I would say a lot of companies you work with and brands you work on, aren't as solid when it comes to the financials as I'd like them to be, you know, coming from more of like a sales or a business to business background. Like there's a CFO on most of the conversation leading it, there isn't really a lot of CFOs joining our calls and like, just to have that actual like accounting report is something I think we push brands to do whether it be them putting their cogs in triple oil that are like, Hey, how, how firm are these? Like, are these solids, you have a separate spreadsheet working off of okay, I'd really like you to kind of, for lack of a better term get a little naked get a little vulnerable. So we can actually look at what's going on. Because if you tell me this row as is good, but then on your back, and you're mitigating it, you're not to be malicious, but you're not showing us what's going on. Like, how do we know how good we're doing? So I would say just overall just efficiency has been a big thing we've, we've worked on, maybe you're not trying to scale at this point during this time of year, that's fine. There were some peak seasons. There are some even just like macro trends. March through April, people get a tax return, Mother's Day stay away from Memorial Day Sale coming up Fourth of July. But like between that Father's Day, of course, but like it's really, really tough during the summer. So just being efficient early on, if it's important. So you can actually spend later in the year because we've had brands that haven't done that well. So just overall efficiency is like the biggest one, I think we're trying to do the best that we can.
Mariah Parsons 19:21
So okay, that's that's very helpful, a very comprehensive, comprehensive summary. So would you say that you're kind of following the same cycle in terms of like your peak season per se, in the seat that you're in right now when focusing on ads and efficiency and making sure that you have enough money towards the end of the back half of the year, then you're kind of gearing up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday at the same the same way that the brands that you're working with are doing so right like you're kind of using the first half of this year to plan and to like okay, this is maybe I don't know if maintenance is the right word, but just making sure that you're Looking at all the data of like, okay, Black Friday, Cyber Monday last year, even if it was underwhelming across the board, like what lessons are there still to learn and then trying to apply that in the back half of the year? Right?
Matt Froehlich 20:11
Yeah, I think that's super. That's a good point, like the our efficiencies and the inadequacies like this is only going to be my third Black Friday, coming up. And one was with One Agency, when one was with another, I won't say which agency or brand it was, we, there was a brand at one point. early November just ran out of cash, they literally couldn't even run the ads anymore. And it's like, they weren't with us with that at the time. They were with us for a full year. But it's like, you inherit something that you don't even know about until it's like funding runs out. We can't even activate this because you spent all your money. So it's like this first part of the year. Let's make sure our pop ups are getting people into our subscription list. Let's make sure whatever we're activating on an SMS standpoint, email, we're getting people because that's like, a really important thing to do is obviously get people once they get to the site, I'm getting cheap traffic with my meta ads and tiktok ads, you know, a decent amount of Google but like, from getting they're not absorbing them into a list like on the back half of the year. They're, they're basically they're not worth anything to me, if if I can't get them on a list. They mean nothing like those email lists are so important. We even have a brand that we just started with. A call it the first of the year that was in the UK now also is in the US. And just like activating and growing that list. It's been phenomenal the last 60 days just to see, we've exceeded their expectations because of activation, don't the list pushing them to be like, Hey, we're trying to be really efficient. We need a good offer. Like we can't just get people to sign up for your blog, they don't really care. Maybe that works in the UK. And they'll defer to us because they're like, Okay, you're the US market expert, which is somewhat true. But we're also a DTC agency. Expert. We know what people want. But yeah, using this time of the year that we're kind of getting into a slower phase, people are becoming disconnected, whether it be consumers, even operators, like, after Memorial Day, people have summer plans, people are doing things, hey, let's carry the momentum from Memorial Day into into a Father's Day into a fourth of July. And after that, it's like, Okay, do we do a Labor Day Sale? Let's start talking about let's start talking about Black Friday, just to get a kick the tires a little bit more, check the cobwebs off. But yeah, I would say the first half of your just being efficient to get people signed up and effectively using those dollars. And honestly, when it's a little bit more relaxed, not the Black Friday time, easier to roll up your sleeves, like we're working on a brand right now that we're just launching a new website for them helping with a huge CRO audit, like, what better time of the year to do it then right now. And we know historically, it's a slower time for them. So let's lean into that slow time and not try to go crazy in May and June, like let's use this little time to our advantage. And there's never really a good time to blow up a website or reevaluate. But like, out of the 12 months is probably the two best to do that. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 22:56
yeah. So on that line of reevaluating websites and tech stocks and everything, do you find that when you're coming in and seeing you know, a brand has XYZ in their tech stack. And this isn't proving enough ROI, or doesn't have a big enough ROI to justify having it in their tech stack? My guess would be a lot of merchants and brands are they're okay with, you know, letting you all handle like the analysis part of it of saying like, you don't need this crosser off the list, take it off, like but you do need this. So that would be my assessment, would you say across the board? That's pretty fair of like, brands are more than willing to have someone come in clean up shop? Or is there any resistance I guess to doing that, because usually it's like consolidation, I feel like is the movement of 2024 of just making sure attribution from the tech that a brand is using is clear and like not some, you know, untraceable or not too big of a window to maybe be attributed to other things that, you know, that are in your tech sock working with a specific platform. So what's your what's kind of your, I guess, viewpoint on all of that? Yeah,
Matt Froehlich 24:07
I would say there's a few one is, if you're gonna get rid of something, at least it suggests at least have a suggestion of why or not even know why like, you're paying $1,000 a month for this. We know this software can do the same for 200 bucks, great. Let's hop on a call and do that. You can't just say just get rid of it to get rid of it. Because it's like, well, they had it for a reason. Now, it's not to say that, you know, especially in marketing, and then what we do is like, you know, I've been an agency like for four years. That seems like a long time, you know, the different different milestones that I've seen across the industry where if I were working in a manufacturer or something more like a blue collar roll, it's like, stuff doesn't change that much like there's a lot of the same practices. So like, just because you have used this software for three years, more than likely there's another competitor out there that can either offer something better. And I mean, we're seeing that across email right now there's a lot of email noise out there that have certain I'll just speak on them like clay vo has gone in a complete different direction, their pricing model, they're bringing an agency aspect in house, it's like, holy cow like and claimed it was like the staple. It's like, how are you going to navigate off that not that we're removing CLEVEO from a stack, but like, if a client has an appetite to do that, we would we would guide them through that and help them generally what I like to do is they get inbounded all the time, I have a client that will email me for me every single sales initiative he gets, he's gotten better at like scrubbing through them a little bit more. Because like I already get my own, but it's like, oh, this is a great one. He's usually on the cutting edge of stuff. Like there'll be updates to klavier with you. And he knows that we're like, he's almost sometimes the first to tell us because he's so good at it. They're like, okay, cool, this is something you have to activate. So I would say if you're gonna offer something, or they hate this, this platform sucks this product, the SAS product sucks, give them an alternative, or say, hey, you know, we're gonna roll up our sleeves together, we're gonna hop on with your sales rep. And we're gonna hook him more efficient, because sometimes they're just not taking wheat, or they aren't taking advantage of the offers. Like that's, that's a big part of it all the time. Even with a meta, they're rolling out new things. And if you new strategies, or new components, just ask like, Hey, you're rolling out this anything that we can test to get a credit for. Same thing with SAP partners, like any new initiative you're trying out that we can get some credit for, for 60 days, or whatever doing it that way. The other one that's challenging as you work with, let's just talk about since August, like I've worked with brands since then. And they're still new tech that they have that I you know, they don't come on an onboarding call with a dump of a document of, oh, we use this for audience, we have this little plugin for our SAS or this for Salesforce. Like, they don't come with it, you kind of find things along the way, which is, it's challenging, I guess it's not as overwhelming as it could be. If they gave you a list of 36 different logins you have to dive into and figure out which one's the best. But generally, you get your real wide right, is this affecting my audiences, this affecting conversion? How is it affecting with my email sender, my email optimization, then you can kind of get a little more granular after that. But there's a lot of different apps out there, especially within Shopify that you can save a ton of money on and not that they're going to be there forever, but at least for maybe a cycle of a year, they're there. And all of a sudden, 2025 there's a new one fixing this other problem that you didn't know it was a problem. But yeah, there's no perfect world, I've come to realize they don't come, you know, an agency or excuse me, an agency doesn't get a brand. And they just the brand doesn't come with every piece of onboarding documentation ever. They don't come with all these logins, you kind of just figure it out along the way. And but again, if you're going to switch them from something, have a reason. Maybe it's a bad, maybe there's a bad communicator, we've had a couple of those where there's like, I just don't want to work these people because they suck. Yeah, maybe their pricing model switches. They don't tell you like there's so many different factors, you got to kind of lean into those pain points as we as we do. And we're kind of their third their therapists a little bit too. So help them through that and figure out which is important. They might come to a call and you're like, what's wrong, performance is great. They're like, Oh, I just got off a call with this person. And I need you to hop on with me. They're, they're kind of giving me the runaround. It's like, alright, let's figure it out. Let's do it. Send the callin link, we'll hop on, we'll fix it.
Mariah Parsons 28:13
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love that relationship of like, you're, you're not in house, but you're still dealing with like, the internal issues that brands face of, okay, I have to go hop on this sales call, or, you know, I'm getting this marketing initiative sent to me, blah, blah, blah, right, like kind of assessing a lot of different areas that maybe wouldn't traditionally, if someone wasn't in the space think exactly that, you know, that's the role that you all are playing. So you mentioned, you know, like with the clay vo example of the updates that they're making to their platform. And then meta is one of those other examples. So is there anything fun that you've seen meta rollout that you would want to, you know, share with other brands who are listening of, okay, like this is something new that they've rolled out, or this is something that they've hinted or declared that they will be publishing this soon that you're finding interesting? Yeah,
Matt Froehlich 29:01
I've I've been trained in my DTC world to kind of be a little bit skeptical of meta,
Mariah Parsons 29:08
like, Yeah, nothing most.
Matt Froehlich 29:10
I know, it's like, new product, great, new offering. Cool. I'm on Twitter, and people that spend 10x, the amount of budget I do as an operator will share a screenshot of something like this new update to metal when I think of over the weekend, instead of it being from like, draft mode in review processing, there now have a new status that's called Preparing, like, what what is that? Why do we need that
Mariah Parsons 29:37
I figured, like, I figured,
Matt Froehlich 29:39
like, review mode was in review. So it's like, that's just that's not a tactical thing. I would say. I know, there's a lot of stuff that they're rolling out with, like value conversion is starting to be a new thing. You know, it's just everything's cyclical. There's, I think back to when I started in the DC world about two years ago. It's like, okay, we're the you know, the At top of funnel, middle of funnel bottom of funnel setup we would have was one thing and we would have 20% to get dedicated retargeting and different audience testing. And honestly, at this point like, advanced plus shopping campaigns are solid, like if you're running a small enough budget, even if you have a big budget, like you should have a majority of it going towards there. Just even those audiences that are changing in there, they're updating all the time, like, oh, you know, I do a lot of just duplicate a campaign relaunch, update ads, you know, less is more sometimes, in my early days, I was building out new campaigns and not hacking my way around and not doing that. Now, it's like you've come across these different optimizations you can do with these settings. And there's some sometimes I'm looking at like, this wasn't here four weeks ago. Well, Matt, is that like, sending me a pop up every time and be like, hey, remember, when you logged in, made 12. Look what's different now. And it's like, you kind of got us got to go and like troubleshoot. A lot of what we do is kind of just sharing internally with all of our brands, I would say the big one too, is just on Twitter, seeing what people are talking about. Some of its BS, some of its really, really valuable. But I would say just advantage post shop and campaign, some adding some different audience optimizations has been great. And there's just new trends all the time. Sometimes I with the budgets, I'm running in the brands I'm working with i i tend to not want to take too much of their budget to like testing different audiences and stuff. I would rather like what's working, let's just push intentioinal and beautiful ad creative. Let's push spend, let's push, making sure that those 678 Top metrics are doing well. And then if we really want to get tactful we can try this new trend I'm seeing on Twitter, like I saw recently that people are talking about add to carts being a thing again, optimistic. You're great, everything sounds good in theory, until you actually start trying it, you're like, Well, that was a waste of money back I kind of was saying a while ago, it's like I don't want to spend people's money just to spend, I want to make sure it's effective. And if you're going to be doing something that's a little bit to me off the wall, I like to tell a client that like I'm not gonna say it's like, a first client I'm testing this with, but it's like, no, I've seen some value on this. We've talked about internally, I've seen it on Twitter, but nothing on Facebook, that's like a huge, groundbreaking thing. The biggest one has been the advanced plus shopping campaigns. But those are from a year ago, creative is still some of the same things that have been consistent for years are still important, good creative, making sure that spend is being appropriately positioned proportioned out. Diving in further, were my soft metrics, my cost per acquisition costs, cost per click, click through rate, some frequency stuff, okay, those are good. You go to the website, or you check Shopify or triple, you're like, well, there's been inadequacies, we're driving people to the homepage, the homepage sucks the collection page, like, generally, it's, it's really, really difficult. I don't have this very often, if I'm working with a brand for more than two, three months without some top creative, then I'm finding winners that I can then say, hey, there's my top creatives, let's work in our destination. Rarely does it take more than a quarter to figure that out. Of course, I can get more scale and iterate off those. But like generally, it's like finding it this click threatens cost per click kind of on you or us depending who's managing the website to fix that. So creative still king, and just being intentional with your spends still came. I don't know what those next phases are from, no, they're rolling out these new items. And I'm pretty skeptical because I get on a call with a client and the metal reps talking about something and I'm just like, oh, yeah, that's, that's gonna correct that f of a call. That's not really a thing we do. And they all have these practices. In theory. It's like if you're in college, and they're teaching you this stuff, it's like, oh, this sounds great from a textbook, or that sounds great. Someone that worked in the industry 20 years ago, like, how does it actually work in so you get into it, I would love some of these meta reps to hop on a client call and go through why they're spending on a certain platform or something and get the value, they probably go back to the traditional just set of conversion based sales components and all these extra layers of spending money just to spend money. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 34:00
yeah, totally fair. Do you feel like tick tock is putting more pressure on them to like, ramp up their speed? Right.
Matt Froehlich 34:07
Absolutely. I mean, when the Tick Tock and also the boom, but we saw, you know, tick tock was a, it still is an evolving platform. And that's I always kind of take inventory on, you know, having a organic social, I got my foot in the door with social media, like, I'm always on. Basically every app, the only thing I'm not using right now is threads because it's threads. Yeah, but I'm using every other app because I want to see from an engineering standpoint, and a functionality standpoint, and a feature standpoint, which ones are adding things or removing things, and I think that's the best way to like any business like if a business is like constantly doing this, they're not changing anything for a long time. You can probably sense like, either they don't want to grow or they don't have the right people working for them. And I've noticed like, you know, between some, you know, between LinkedIn, X Facebook Welcome Tiktok and Instagram like, tick tock is always evolving with something like an eye check. Tick tock probably once a day, like at night I do that dooms strolling at the end of the night. Yeah. And it's like there's a new feature. There's something new in there, where it's like I go on Facebook, and it's not that new. Like they're adding the dating tab, which is strange. I don't need that. Yeah, exactly.
Mariah Parsons 35:20
Yeah.
Matt Froehlich 35:20
Do I want to know that better? It's now searching by AI that really, but like, I think I just look at like, kind of get wide. And you look at which platform is evolving and adapting. Tic Tac? Yes. Are they getting pressure from the Fed? Yes. Has that happened before from them? Yes, it happened, I believe back in 2021, or 2022. And actually wrote, I think I actually wrote a blog on it for my old agency. But yeah, it's been competitions great. Like you never want to have yes, they all have they both have their main purpose tic tac just keep you on their Scroll, scroll scroll. Facebook is a complete kind of just an ocean of what it does. But like, can you keep your consumers on there for them to buy Tiktok Jones a great job, especially with tick tock shop, Facebook, as that it just, it takes a lot longer to when you've gone in one direction for so long to like, implement this new thing. But the pressure has been great, because a couple, just even the support from an agency level has been way different the last nine months than it was for my first three years, it's getting more touch points are getting assigned to people their communications better. I think it's been great. But again, the competition is necessary. And I think it's something that we have to have in our environment. Otherwise, we're just so reliant on one platform. As a media buyer, that's, that's never good. You never you want to have a variety, whether it's at 8015, five spend, you don't want to have 100% on something or just Google and Facebook only. I think that's a that's a bad idea. Yep.
Mariah Parsons 36:51
I also to a I'm also curious, just from a operational standpoint of looking at all the different social media platforms, but then also understanding the cultures that are on them. Social media for ecommerce brands encompasses a lot, there's so much to take into consideration. So that you can say like, okay, there's a brand that's targeting more Gen Z, and the online shopper which were an E commerce, so is most of the people that we're working with, they care about how people are shopping online. But just knowing like even Facebook versus Tik Tok of someone who dooms scroll doing scrolls on Tik Tok way more, they're probably way more comfortable with the idea of buying online and vetting a business through that platform, rather than Facebook, maybe they would see an ad and then go and search for that website and go off the platform itself to buy. So I always, I'm an avid enjoyer of the platform myself, just to like, see what other brands are out there. And of all these founders that are, you know, making content around their brands. But the discoverability on that app is something that is very, I'm very in tune with both as a consumer and then also working in this space. So I like that you brought up that you can see the features and like, probably make a good guesstimate, at least of okay, how quickly are they rolling out the product? But then from the other side of how quickly is the culture developing in terms of what people are caring about how to know how to market on those platforms, because you're an actual consumer yourself? I think it's a very interesting time, I think to be in the space, especially the ad space, just looking from an outside, you know, third party view of seeing all the different ads that are being marketed towards Yeah, like guerilla marketing of, you know, going back to billboards and trending and trying to find like that viral moment. It's a very interesting time. Definitely.
Matt Froehlich 38:41
And the last I want to bring up is like, when I didn't really run much tic tac in my old agency, the the brands didn't have appetite for it. And there was a reason behind that. Because it was a really, really poor acquisition channel. Gotcha. Good brand awareness might have dropped a batch of ads, you might have one that would be solid for a week to 14 days, but then it would just fall off a hill, off a cliff. And now like recently, it's actually become a really good acquisition channel, we have one client that actually that's their best acquisition channel as far as just like efficiency goes which is like, unheard of that hasn't been a thing for them for a long time. And all of a sudden, it's just been there and I think a lot of it has to do with your experience or the customer experience in mind and just the Tick Tock shops and and being such a better school to get people in there. Completely random, but it kind of aligns like I think the way you're buying on tick tock is similar, like Timo and people are very, very, like, willing to spend and gamble if you will, on a really really cheap product. And I know team was kind of in a polarizing item in the DVC world recently. Like, if people are comfortable to put their credit card in and some random Chinese website, like they're gonna do the same thing on an app that they're gonna buy something for cheap, and it's just it's kind of like a think, yes, could my information be stolen? While it might be worth the risk if I Get this $3 pair of joggers that generally look like they're $50. But I'm gonna get something cheap. And I don't know, I think people just their tolerance for putting your credit card in on an app that they know everyone else is buying on is is great. or on Facebook or Instagram, like you said, the offer isn't that amazing? I'll screenshot it, I'll save it, I'll come back to it later actually go to the website and fill it out where it's just like it's still not as clean as it is on tick tock. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 40:25
yeah, I definitely think there's something to be said about the bandwidth mentality, or the band bandwagon effect. That's what it is of just like people knowing that other people are shopping. So it's perfectly fine. Or, you know, all like, user information, right? And getting something cheap. But then there's also the other side of, you can see, like, all these product reviews, and people telling you don't shop here, because it's their quality, right? So, you know, there's pros and cons. And you can't really dissect any of the Tiktok or Teemu experiences from both of them, which is good, because you'll get a good good understanding, I guess, of how the masses are shopping. With that, I'll wrap this up, because I know we're a little bit over, but we just, you know, we got caught up in it. And that's exactly what I kind of expected. Anyways, so, Matt, thank you for taking the time to chat with us here today. Super excited to get this one live. And maybe we'll be at an event soon enough.
Matt Froehlich 41:19
I hope so. I've really, really you got me kind of having a little FOMO and we have done in the pre recording and like, you go to these events. Yeah, in New York City. Then you brought up shop talk in the fall in Chicago, which is not far from my house not far from where you live either. And it's like, Dude, I just gotta get I'm gonna be a father and then what a week so I'm just trying to get through that period and then come fall, hit the ground running again and get ready before you know, Black Friday Cyber Monday but yeah, I'm excited to get to more events. Events are a blast. And it's cool just to meet a ton of cool people and hurting like yourself met some really awesome people that we're still in contact with. It's not like these people go to convention like alright, well, we'll see you next year. It's not the case and the environment working because we're all on our damn phones and always doing something so there's always a connection point whether it be with Twitter, LinkedIn, or a business card, I suppose. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 42:09
there you go. There you go. Or Doom scrolling on tick tock. Tick tock. Yes, yes. I'm glad you brought up that your soon to be father because I meant to do an intro but then we just got to the you know, we were off to the races. So yes, very excited. Hopefully. You know, we'll we'll see. I think Shop Talk ball, for sure. Going and then maybe seeing some people and grow new york, give him a shout out. But we'll be in touch about all of that. So absolutely. Great having you on. Thank you.