– Many people in ecommerce at larger brands see their entire salary being spent on advertising, leading to questions about self worth and the understanding of value.
– Owning an audience that people want to access can give a significant advantage in tipping the scales in one’s favor.
– The measurement of incremental lift and attribution in services and technology is challenging, and the value of an audience and understanding that audience will be crucial in the future.Invest in building and understanding your audience to gain a competitive advantage in marketing and ecommerce.Free. This is the price that everyone wants to pay for services, advice, and technology. Whatever provides a return. This is the price that everyone will pay for ads with a goal of 2x ROAS. Perceived value is a crazy thing. It feels weird when a brand spends what they pay you for a year in less than one day on ads. This is likely the current reality for most people who work in e-commerce at larger brands. This is what used to happen when I worked for a brand too. I would watch my salary go out in less than a weekend in marketing spend and question my self-worth. The juxtaposition of working full-time for a company only to see your entire salary get spent on advertising with no guarantees continues to confuse me. It’s not that the value is in question, it’s the understanding of the value that seems to be where a gap exists. This is how important an audience is. If you own an audience that people want to access, you can tip the scales in your favor. We don’t treat the work of consultants, strategists, and employees the same way we treat investing in advertising. Facebook and Google have made it deceptively easy to qualify your spend and thus benchmark performance based on that. It’s harder to measure the impact of advice. You can baseline it, but usually, there are too many variables to properly understand how things change with exterior market forces at play as well. By this logic, if you invested a dollar with me and I made you $1 back, you should be happy. If you pay me $100k and I make you $200k, you should be thrilled. But that’s not how these things are calculated. This is because, on average with ads, the gains that you get are not likely to average more than 2x across the board, especially at scale from new customers. The hardest part people have around services and technology though is the incremental lift measurement. You can baseline against the norm, but at the end of the day, with a lot of what we do, attribution will never be perfect because we touch on so many different parts of the customer journey. Unfortunately, most of the business doesn’t follow this logic. We get lumped into two categories, ads and not ads. If I make you more money in a month, I don’t get paid more. People are willing to pay for distribution, they are very quick to cut software, services, and employees. We live in a completely warped world right now. Last month we quietly tested something we’ve been working towards that leverages our technology. The value of an audience is going to be more important than ever and the understanding of that audience is going to make all the difference. #marketing #data #ecommercehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco