B2C Marketing in Turbulent Times - Insights

There are defensive and offensive strategies you can work on now.

Defensive

1) Change your campaign budget allocation, allocate more to prospecting.

Data from the beginning of March shows that CAC costs have gone up, with prospecting (top-of-the-funnel) ads being least affected and retention being worst impacted.7

2) Change your creatives

Get rid of creatives that show groups of people, try single-person or product imagery.

Emphasize safety and convenience

"Rapid delivery", "Ships from US/locally" work well

3) Do SITEWIDE promos, don’t do single product promos on certain products

(Myprotein does a lot of tests like this)

4) Launch product-view optimized campaigns

People have a lot of time and want browse, give them what they want.

Test results: ROAS 2x to 16x

5) Build retargeting or video view pools for later harvest

Build your retargeting audiences NOW, then harvest them LATER

You can retarget audiences for up to 180 days on FB/IG.

6) Build up email lists

Email open rates have gone up, unsubscribe rates have gone down. People want to devour information on what to do.

Offensive

7) Revisit channel performance, revisit marginal channels because all CPCs are down.

8) Throw out old norms, renegotiate payment terms and periods and media bid types.

Example: Influencer apocalypse

Big brands have cut funding to influencers. All the influencers depending on big brand sponsorships are now much more willing to consider revenue-share models.

9) Revisit your performance DAILY

Track your attribution daily using things like the Attribution Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics

"Mixed-used used to be X, now it's Y, we need to do this"

10) Build customer and prospect loyalty

Tactical Nuggets:

1) Competitor Conquest

Large brands are dropping out of PPC auctions.

Survey your top 30 competitors, see who dropped out. Your bids are going to be lower and you can snipe their keywords

2. Increase your email frequency.

People read them more frequently now, there is a shift to desktop from mobile.

3. Targeted promotions to get some cashflow

4. Revisti intent-based campaigns.

Think of ways to target bottom-of-funnel, high intent keywords.

Poor man's attribution model:

Compare first click vs last click to see where an opportunity is won or lost

People are being very “browsy”, they click on your ads and browse around, but are less willing to impulse buy

Data

Overall CACs are up.

CPMs down across retention, retargeting, prospecting

CTR unchanged

Conversion rates are down - retention and retargeting down 60%, prospecting down 40%.

Scenario Planning

This helps you understand what it looks like to go into cockroach mode, how to cut spend and how to keep trust with customers.

The best scenario for many companies is actually coming out of the crisis stronger in 201-22 than original projections.

Why? Legacy competition is disrupted, consumer behaviour is changing and there is more discovery and trial. Customer acquisition is less competitive.

1. Existing Customer Growth

Identify whether your customers have churned or gone dormant.

If your customers are SMBs who will shut down without stimulus support, then you will have significant, perpetually lost revenue.

Has the underlying behaviour changed?

For online education and food delivery, it definitely has, on the positive side.

Travel and events, it has also changed on the negative side.

2. New customer acquisition

Shorten your learning cycle by using proxies.

You don't have the luxury of months-long experiments any more.

You can get feedback on CAC faster than LTV.

As proxies for LTV, build new dashboards that reduce components of your LTV equation to daily metrics.

Sometimes you can see what's happening in first day activation rates that can tell you 60-80% of what will happen in the first month.

AOV/transactional metrics: look at browsing behaviour and cart sizes instead of order volume.

Cost-metrics, e.g. for fintech companies, look at daily payment failures instead of defaults.

Daily coupon usage instead of promo spend.

if you can more quickly gain confidence that this machine works, you can get back into the market faster

Tips from Q&A:

Don't go too salesy or talk about "COVID" explicitly in your ads. People are craving info on what to do now. Be a resource, something that helps them go through what to do.

if you are doing well, be sensitive not to screw it up or be arrogant. If you are not doing well, feed info cravings people have, and make it easy for them to interpret.

Examples of businesses doing their marketing well now:

Loom, Shopify.

Remember that now you are getting marginal customers, they wouldn't be your target market ordinarily. They need more onboarding and handholding on how to use it.