Ep 546: How Pilothouse’s Strategy Team Transformed Ad Accounts & Grew Audiences

0:00At the end of the day, everybody wants growth, right? And our job is to ensure, like, how do we grow businesses, especially DTC brands? If you were running a little DTC brand on fidget spinners back in 2020, like, your Shopify was going berserk. But the game was on easy mode, and today the game is on hard mode.

0:18Abby:When I'm auditing brands and I see the same ad across each stage of the funnel, there's something wrong. You can't make an effective top of funnel ad until you've identified who your segments are and who are the personas within that segment. There's tools out there where you can make 60 ads in 10 minutes and they look pretty good. Anyone can do that. And that's why the game's getting more competitive. And the only way to win is if you understand your customer and develop better, thoughtful, creative.

0:51it's all killer no filler and i am here with abby and henry from the ddc instagram meme fame you guys made some really viral videos for us but you're also leading our account strategy team over at pilot house welcome to the all killer no filler show how are you guys doing doing good thanks for having us eric talk to me about what an account strategist does what is the account strategy role at Pilot House?

1:13Abby:Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of people ask that. We pretty much are the bridge between the client and the account teams at Pilot House, but we differ from being a typical account manager, which I think you'd see at a lot of agencies, because we're actually the ones kind of like behind the wheel making the strategy and executing it across accounts. So it's anywhere from media planning to creative strategy, where we think like that channel's most needed, we guide that strategy and provide those insights. Strategy is such an interesting word. It's the word that I'm hearing so much from everyone this year.

1:48And I feel like we've kind of come from an era where the technology was so good, you didn't always need the best strategy. You know, you could sort of like just sort of spend into a platform and get results. But I feel like now with all the pressures on DTC brands, you just really need to be sure that your strategy is right really before you're spending on that. Is that something that resonates with you, Henry? Yeah, I don't know if it's like before you're spending on it, but I think at the end of the day, everybody wants growth, right? And our job is to ensure like how do we grow businesses, especially DTC brands.

2:24And basically every brand has a goal, which usually lies in either profitability or growth. And basically our goal as strategists is to analyze every piece of their e-commerce marketing funnel, I guess you could say, like everywhere from Google, Meta, you know, are we going on Pinterest? Do we have YouTube ads? Do we even have like TV ads? Because, you know, that affects Shopify all the way down to email and essentially come up with the objections, basically the direction really of the account team. and the whole goal is to find that growth or profitability so what that looks like is very up in the air i guess you could say based on the you know account essentially and and what that brand is and what their goals are but to your point eric like the game in 2020 was essentially easy it's like oh let's just post like a sticky note ad or like if i just take a photo of this box of my, you know, product.

3:26Yeah. Yeah. Warehouse. It's like, we have a four row as and things are going crazy. And what I think a lot happened a lot, like I think fidget spinners, if you were running a little DTC brand on fidget spinners back in 2020, like your Shopify was going berserk basically, but the game was on easy mode. And today the game is on hard mode and every agency, everybody running ads, doesn't matter who you are, has a limited amount of resources. You only have so much ad spend. You only have so many members. You can only make so many ads. You can only test so many things. And the goal with our job and being strategists is to evaluate like what is the best direction for our team?

4:14How do we put all our resources into the things that matter? How do we ignore the nonsense and basically cut through the noise so that we can actually drive meaningful long-term growth for DTC brands? And I guess it's a challenge too, because you don't always, in a perfect world, a brand comes to us and we, Pilot House becomes their omni-channel growth team across all different platforms. But I guess in our case, we're helping brands in different ways. What happens when we run into things where we don't maybe control their Google or their Amazon or whatever, but we're trying to enact like a whole brand strategy?

4:46Is that a challenge?

4:47Abby:I don't think it's a challenge because we always pride ourselves in integrating ourselves into a team's marketing. It's an opportunity. It's an opportunity, right? So I work with brands where we work on their email channel and their meta channel and do CRO work, but we don't necessarily run their Google ads. So I start to think, okay, well, how can I join those Google calls, get insights into, you know, if our top of funnel is great on meta, is branded search going up and doing its job properly? And it's more so just, as a strategist, you're the person that helps provide insights without having channels act siloed anymore.

5:23Abby:So it's just, yeah, it's a different way of work, but I just try to integrate myself into the team. Can you give me an example, maybe without using any brands, of a time with an account where you applied a strategy that maybe, you know, in years past where we didn't have the account strategist role, it would have just gone right into media buying or something. Can you give me an example of a strategy that you guys have employed that really worked well. I think, you know, going back to what I just said about like the game being on easy mode, right? The media buying game, like specifically on meta, it was all about just optimization, right?

5:57You run an ad, it has a two row ads, let's double down, let's scale it. Like, how do we make more of these ads? You've launched another one, it has a four row as you keep going, right? All the way down the spin cycle of looking backwards. But the problem is, it's actually easy marketing, if you think about it. It doesn't take a data scientist to look at an ad account and see this ad at a four row as, so let's make more. It's almost like common logic, not really like genius marketing. And the problem is, a lot of brands, especially brands that come to Pilot House, are looking for now growth. And they're usually stunted in growth.

6:34So we're looking backwards at data to make our decisions for the future, but we're not happy with what just happened over the last two years. Like we've been declining for two years. Why would we be looking backwards if that's no longer the direction we want to go? and that's really where the genius of our strategists come in right is basically identifying what have we not done what are the untapped audiences and how do we unlock the true potential of our business basically and so yeah i mean going back to q4 of last year actually starting right around this time august i worked with a brand and everything in the ad account was 65 plus Meta was going 65 plus.

7:17We weren't happy with our ROAS. Our product didn't really speak to 65 plus, except that's just where Meta was placing us because Meta is looking for the easiest conversion and the pixel was optimized for that. So we identified that basically younger females were going to be our target market, basically busy working professionals and parents. So we built out a whole framework of creative that tied our product. Well, first of all, we looked at like the two we had two segments right we looked at the main pain points of I'll just say stick with moms and like some of it is that they basically have no time they do have disposable income because they're working or married and like in a family so price isn't like the biggest factor but basically time and providing the best for their family are like the two most important things in their life right now especially like new parents and then we developed a whole bunch of creative but you know and at the time like our products solve those problems but we had no communication to moms in our ad creative in our brand etc instead we were just optimized to 65 plus because that's what meta was doing so we basically built out a whole strategy around how we're going to unlock a younger audience yeah basically built out a ton of ads speaking to younger audiences and we launched them like right around this time and what turned from like testing campaigns into basically a restructure of the whole ad account.

8:44We started like targeting below 65. We started seeing improvements in that segment. And if you look at the ad account for the whole year, first of all, like our Black Friday turned into the biggest Black Friday ever. Like we absolutely crushed goals. It was - Got so much bigger. Our audience got so much bigger. I think for all of Q4, like October to December, we were basically up by about 15 % through the Q4 from year over year. And I think we were above goals by about 5 % in revenue while hitting like our efficiency targets, like our ad spend targets. And what's crazy is you look at the whole ad account for the entire year, every single day, the highest spending audience in Meta was 65 plus until Cyber Monday.

9:32And for the first time ever we spent more into 35 to 44 and it just stayed like that from that point on and it was it was crazy i had never seen a shift because most of the time you're like oh we're speaking to audiences they're too high like we're 65 plus so you run a little cgc test or whatever and you try and it's like oh well that failed um and it but like you know a true dedicated strategy initiative strategy shift yeah and it's not going to happen overnight right this is like even that like q4 i think that was like as short of a timeline as you could do it in but really like three months one two to like get things rolling to like a year um to really get things moving um so yeah that was a really successful strategy and then to your earlier question that was mostly done on meta but you now have learnings on meta about exactly how to speak to the audience you're trying to approach and it's like how can we integrate this into youtube how can we integrate this into Google?

10:31How can we integrate this into our email? And now our motherly emails are going crazy next thing you know, or whatever, right? So yeah, it's really cool what you can learn and apply to the rest of the business. And it opens up other buying holidays. And I think it's just such a valid point that if you just optimize to profitability on a spreadsheet, you can find yourself worked into a corner, right? Whether that's 65 plus, whether you're relying on a sticky note ad to drive all your lower funnel action. Like you really have to think about like what is going to bring new eyeballs, new generations, you know, to this campaign.

11:09Anything from your side, Abby?

11:11Abby:I think the other win out of that is like considering LTV, right? So what cohort is going to become like your best lifetime customer? In Henry's case with that product, is it that 65 plus smaller demo that is just cheap on meta but won't have like a lifetime customer value the same way that a young mom might where she needs to replace the product when she has more kids and thinking of all the different use cases there so i think that's another thing to consider is just um on platform just looking at ads managers some segments might look really really good and it might be enticing for a media buyer to go okay let's 5x spend there and start to cut out some weaker audiences but just be mindful of ltv and see like where are actually like the strongest returns when it comes to looking down a year or two years later as well.

11:57You guys mentioned the department being, you know, up in the air is how you describe it, but really it's just sort of like you're a multi-tool, right? Because everyone's going to come with different understandings of their own strategy. I'm curious, like with brands that you're working with, are brands coming in with a really well-defined strategy that you guys are sort of helping tweak and move sort of based on performance? Or are you finding that brands are still coming in with what you would like with a sort of ill-defined strategy that you guys are really helping define?

12:23Abby:I'd say nine times out of 10, the reason they come to Pilot House is for that strategy piece. It's something that we really heavily in the audit process. And it's something that we identify as missing as well. And they might think they have a strategy, but really what they have done is just creative planning for the rest of the year based off the data, right? So that's one thing. The other thing where a brand might come in with a strategist already, but they just really like us because we have really strong media buyers and they want stronger media planning on their team. So I'd say that they're like a brand would come to Pilothouse for both because we have both.

12:58Abby:But we really do sell ourselves as an agency that provides a strategy. And that's what comes first. Are we taking into account things on their side of the business as well, like contribution margin, for instance, like you want to make sure you're promoting the most profitable things? Like I've heard a lot of people starting to manage all of their, you know, paid ads based on like as much incrementality data as they can. So how does that play into our strategy sessions? Yeah, I think like a easy example is product selection. Just looking at like, I think I've been on here talking about Lifetimely before.

13:33Abby:Definitely talked about it on Jogo's podcast. But like looking at how can we improve AOV for first time purchases? How can we decrease NCAC on that first order? And then what is the product that provides the best LTV, which you can track really well using a tool like Lifetimely, and then using that in your upsell emails or using it in rebuy, like making sure that's landing on the PDP or as like an upsell below the cart button or in your cart actually, right? So I think product selections where we get like really sticky with that and making sure that we aren't just marketing something that might have a really good return on meta with like a low AOV because it's easy to convert, but it's not creating a good lifetime customer.

14:17Abby:So it's not resulting in growth in the brand and something that's sustainable. Anything to add there, Henry? I kind of want to circle back actually, Eric, on to one of your points earlier about brands getting cornered and you asked, you know, how many brands come to us with a plan? And Abby, I think you're saying nine out of 10 is honestly generous. Um, most of the time what we see is I call it the tactical spin cycle. So it's exactly what I described earlier. And you saying, um, getting yourself into a corner is exactly right where, you know, they launch a good ad and they just want to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.

14:52And essentially you're, you're looking backwards and you know, you start to get hooked on like the wrong, wrong things, right? Like, is it the fact that like we use the color blue? Like how do we, we should be making all ads with blue. And it's like, well, is that actually what you're trying to do here is just make ads that are the color blue. And, you know, there obviously maybe are some tactical cases where that makes sense or, you know, using the learnings from your sale periods to make the strongest Black Friday offer. Like I'm all for those things. But when it comes to the strategy of the business coming down to like these spin cycles where you're just looking at ads and in basically in the same downward spiral of trying to improve what you once had versus zooming out and even thinking about the culture around your brand and you know how the world perceives the industry and like one of my favorite examples is if you look at um pretty much any instagram of a candy brand like dunkin donuts or like i don't know sour patch kids they're all tapping in on the culture of the audience that their products resonate with like they're funny they're gen z they're they yeah people are you know they they make great content and they're going viral all the time our brand a lot of ddc brands that are stuck in this spin cycle are just trying to get the next conversion but they're not making any contribution to like the culture whereas if they're starting to touch in on the culture this is where you get like really aware or brand you develop like really good brand awareness and a lot of our brands just play in that like super bottom of funnel consideration even if they don't think they are like they think they're making top of funnel ads but really they're making like a bit like people have to be heavily aware of like what their product is and what their offer is that's where i think like the biggest flaw is maybe is they they come in and they think this tactical spin cycle is their strategy and it's like, we have to pull like way out here and like go back to the beginning.

16:52Like how was your product even introduced, not just your brand, how was our offer like introduced to society? And like, what does America even think about what we offer here? And like, how can we really like just make some fire content that's like moving the culture forward and, you know, leaving our mark on things? Because if you make a reference from a reference from a reference from a reference, it will be a diminishing cycle, right? And I think we've talked about, I've talked about this with all different, like the media buyers at Pilot House about how that'll happen in campaigns where it'll get a bad signal and then it'll start spiraling down a little bit.

17:26I think your example before of just totally expanding the audience to younger women is a great one. Are there any other examples or strategies that we employ to really make sure that brands are getting the right mix of new to returning customers? Because anytime you're playing in that returning customer space, that's also when the platforms get the most greedy because they will want to saturate that bottom part of your funnel as much as possible to take your ad dollars where you really do have to think about strategically, how do I bring more people into that funnel? So any examples of top of funnel expansion that have worked really well?

17:59Abby:I think what always works well in top of funnel is you can't just treat it like past ads. You know what I mean? Like if you look in an ad account and when I'm auditing brands that come in and I see the same ad across each stage of the funnel, there's something wrong. So I would just look at, you can't make an effective top of funnel ad until you've identified who your segments are and who are the personas within that segment. So the work that Henry described of, he figured out it was a young mom or like a working mom or whatever his persona was with that example brand, without doing that heavy work.

18:33Abby:And that comes from the strategy. Your ad doesn't have the line back to like why you made it. You know what I mean? So like you can't just think like, oh, I'm a makeup brand. So I'm going to follow like female TikTok trends and succeed on meta. That's not going to work. You need to figure out like, what about your makeup brand speaks to that specific persona? And then how do you shape content around that in particular? So at top of funnel, I would do that work first. I do it in each stage of the funnel, but then also just make sure that your messaging is different within each stage of the funnel or else your funnel will be pretty boring and repetitive.

19:07What does an audit look like? This is something I was just doing. I was talking with Dougie on the Google side, but like, what does it encompass when you guys get a brand coming in?

19:14Abby:Well, there's two things. Typically we'll do like a technical audit where we're going within the platform because, you know, like media buying and making sure everything set up for you is done well and effective is still important and it's still going to drive performance. So we start with a technical audit, but more so we don't get into the strategic work until we sign on with you. So what that section of the audit looks like is walking you through what our strategic framework is, what you can expect out of our strategy, and then we dive into here's what you're currently doing. It's usually fragmented and the departments are siloed, and we see what are the opportunities in bridging the departments together or channels together, I should say.

19:57Abby:so yeah they're usually about an hour long and you get to hear from each department head or a strategist on that audit and you walk through areas of opportunity within your ad account and then what we think like would be the best path forward with strategy sometimes it's also opening where a brand comes in and they think they just need a meta audit but we go and we look on their site and we see a lot of cro opportunities so we'll present that to them and say, there's a lot more you could be doing with your rebuy, for example, or there's a lot more because we're not seeing you do any page testing.

20:31Abby:So you should start bringing in landing pages into your funnels. So it's adaptive to like what the brand needs. And the stage they're at and their level of investment and everything. How big are landing pages in our strategic approach? I know that's been something we've talked about since the very, very first podcast. I would say landing pages play a role. It basically goes down to what Abby just said there about like, you still need to have good media buying. I consider landing pages, you know, a part of the foundation and like CRO opportunities, like rebuy, right? Like they, they all play a role, but specifically on the e-commerce strategist side of things, like we are looking for that acquisition, like net new customers and growth.

21:11So really it comes back to like what you were just talking about with like prospecting ads, identifying these audiences and how to best approach them. And if we're really like tapping into a new audience and like really starting to fuel things, like really driving like a lot of new customers to the funnel, we just want to make sure that like we're speaking to them, right? Like, and if we're speaking to them in the right way. So if you go from a 65 plus audience to a 35 to 44, like you want to be adjusting your landing pages so that the messaging that you're trying to get across is, is, has continuity across touch points there.

21:46Anything else from the strategy side of things that you guys would want our audience to know? I think one thing I want to say, everybody, every single client I've ever had at Pilot House over my years here goes, we just really want strong ad creative. Like we just want better ad creative. It's like, how do we get our ads just better? Like how do we get our ROAS higher, convert more, et cetera? And I think, you know, everybody has an idea of what better is, right? But what actually is better creative? And this is basically the whole gist of our role is making sure that we're identifying the right people we want to be talking to.

22:27And sometimes you can't look at data, right? And this is why it actually takes really like intelligent wise, like e-commerce strategists, because they can analyze everything they're seeing. They can go into the culture. Like we can do research into like what is happening in America and what are the trends and what are the shifts in society that like are adopting this product and come up with the best possible ways to approach those people like what what are their values how what is their language like is it slang is it proper is it you know swear words and so now that we know their language what are their pain points and how does our product and our brand even solve those pain points.

23:11It could actually just be that sticky note ad, Eric, but does that sticky note ad say the right things on it, right? And does it speak to the right person? So like what a good creative can look like can come in almost any medium. Like it can be an animation. It can be a GIF. It could be a graphic, you know, carousels. I don't think anybody talks about them anymore, but it could be a carousel. You know, it could be anything you want it to be, but you need to know like what the messaging is. And I think every brand is dropping off here because they're just in that, how do we get more conversions?

23:44How do we make, you know, is it blue? You know, how do we do more of the same that we've already done? Do more of the same, whereas like, you got to take that step back, do that deep work and like uncover who your audience really is. And it's like, and then it, and then it's like, whether you're doing UGC, it's like, okay, well, we need a guy with a mustache and a cool haircut, you know, we need, you know what I mean? Like, cause that kind of those learnings will go across all your different ad campaigns, all your different marketing, right? They'll have massive, massive effects. Yeah. And the last thing I'll finish with is like why there's so much gray area here.

24:17And to Abby's point, like we can't really get into this work until like it's signed is because it takes a long time. Like that, everything I just described, like I, if identifying the audience that you want to talk to or the highest potential audience for you was easy, everybody would already be doing that and there would be almost no place for like the strategist right but doing all that research doing all the deep work takes a lot of time and like usually we have multiple team members supporting that strategist to get to those conclusions and once you get there like and you identify those pain points it's almost like the ad creative becomes easy because it's like well if that's their pain point I'm a creative I know how to solve that and you just start to connect with them authentically you can make some crazy shifts in businesses you know if you're willing to take the time it's not going to be like oh this ad has a four row as overnight but if you're willing to learn and at the beginning with 2020 I talked about people winning for the wrong reasons you can start to lose for the right reasons maybe at first because now you're trying the right things and you're not seeing the results but then you at least have more valuable learnings and you can begin to start working towards winning for the right reasons.

25:29And that's where long-term growth is. Abby, what would you add to this?