Andy Gray’s Post

"Upper Funnel" is the fastest growing trend in Paid-Media. But I haven’t read a LI post explaining exactly why upper funnel works. This year we have spent £2,000,000+ on upper funnel campaigns. Here's the fundamental reasons why they work. And what happens when you spend all of your budget on performance. When you run a 100% performance approach, you ask the platform to: - Find users that are in category and drive immediate sales. - You pay a premium for this. - Your competitors do the same. - The more competition. - The higher the cost. Ever heard of a bidding war ? Sure, you can win with discounting. But what happens to your margin ? When you put 20% of your budget to upper-funnel campaigns. -You drive targeted incremental reach. Advertising to people you don't find in performance campaigns. Because they're interested but not ready to buy right now. They then become brand and solution aware. And when they are ready to buy... Who do they think of ? You. The brand that has been advertising to them the past X months. The one they follow on social. The one who's emails they have been opening each month. You might be wondering "How can anybody afford to do that ?" It's cheaper than you think. -On average a reach campaign costs £1 to advertise to 1,000 people -On average a sales campaign costs £8 to advertise to 1,000 people By moving 20% of your budget from performance to brand. You generate a lot of incremental reach. Incremental reach = Incremental opportunities. I’m not suggesting killing all performance spend. You still need to generate sales short term. But when we have a system that creates new opportunities. And converts opportunities. We have a full-funnel approach designed for driving growth. - If you’re a 7-figure brand, that's considering full-funnel strategies and need a better understanding of how and why they work. Drop me a message and i'll guide you through.

99.9% of marketers get this wrong about Full Funnel marketing. And the .1% that understand do a terrible job explaining. No wonder CMO's have a hard time getting budgets signed off. It's actually quite simple. Long-term brand building. ALSO Drives short-term performance. Not at the same level as a 100% performance approach. But sales stil happen. When we describe strategies taking 10-12 months . What we really mean is: That's when the real magic happens. That's when new customer acquisition costs fall. Blended ROI increases. And you wonder "why you didn't do this earlier ?" Now you are ready to take this to your CFO. If you need help forecasting the first 12 months of your full funnel strategy drop me a DM and i'll guide you through it.

My biggest struggles implementing full-funnel marketing was: 1. Getting full stakeholder buy-in. 2. Preventing budget cuts after 3 months. 3. Getting the right creative for the strategy to work. 4. Comparing outcomes with performance KPI's. 5. Obsessing over Upper-Funnel strategies and losing focus on performance. It's hard i for any CEO or CMO to invest in upper-funnel. Taking a leap into the unknown can be scary. Here's my advice: 1. Stakeholders need to agree "This will take time, you will be scared". 2. Once the budget is signed off, see it through to 10-12 months. 3. Creative is key, get it right before you start. 4. Outline the KPI's you are measuring and eliminate distractions. 5. Stay focussed on your performance channels. Get the timing right and get the fundamentals right And you will set yourself up for success. What's stopping you getting started? If your brand is considering upper-funnel investment but would like a second opinion, i'm happy to guide you through the checklist we use to deem if a brand is ready.

Is AIG-UGC dangerous for the marketing world ? Tools like Arcads are making it easier than ever to fake UGC using AI. Yet marketers and brands are celebrating this as innovation. I'm not so sure. Sure AIG-UGC: - Is cost effective. - Allows you to test hooks and messaging at scale. - Gives you full control of your UGC. But. Something doesn't feel right. This technology is only going to improve. Which means that more and more people are going to be fooled. If this was B2B and we faked reviews. Reputations would be ruined. In D2C this is fair game. The excuse is: "We all know what's genuine and what's faked". But what about: The young ? The impressionable ? The older generation ? Should we not be protecting them ? Have you tried out these tools ? Is there a difference between influencer factories and AIGUGC ? Does this need regulating ? Let me know your take in the comments.

Paid Media strategies you NEED to know. (April 24 edition) Outdated strategy: Set it and forget it Advantage Shopping Campaigns. Wondering why things don't scale. Whitelisting with any influencer. DPA's with white backgrounds. Platform Performance Metrics. Blended Google Performance. Platforms stealing attribution. 100% Performance focus. Midjourney Creative. Hundreds of ad sets. Last Click Models. Lazy agencies. Pixel tracking. AI Videos. ROAS. MER. Your strategy April 2024: Taking winning affiliate content from TikTok shop and pushing on Meta. Virtually any campaign objective to Reels as a placement. Understanding the role of the platform. Targeted upper-funnel campaigns. The resurgence of carousel ads. Advertising on YouTube shorts. Creative Analysis with Motion. Conversion Leads Integration Geo-Lift testing with TikTok. Measurement studies. Incremental ROAS. Proactive agency. Scaling Revenue. Live Shopping. Scaling spend. What would you add?

You can't scale a business with paid-media without asking this question. "Are those results incremental ?". £10 CPA in PMAX - "Are those results incremental ?" 15x ROAS in Meta - "Are those results incremental ?" 5x MER in Total - "Are those results incremental ?" They're not. And that's why you lose performance when you increase budget. Because The only route to stable growth is understanding: -> Which sales would have happened anyway. -> Which sales were driven by marketing. Then you need to spend more time driving sales than taking credit for them. It's hard in the beginning. Tough conversations need to take place. But, if you are ambitious about growing, it all starts with knowing.

🔥 NEW Facebook Ads updates 🔥 Meta has rolled out a new creative enhancement as part of their Advantage+ suite. This update makes sure paid media teams receive 30+ screenshots and Slack messages from brand teams asking "who adjusted the ad creative". Don't like weekends ? Then make sure to leave all of these optimisations checked. - Make sure to share this with a colleague who needs reminding to switch off creative enhancements before the weekend.

2024 will be the year brands focus on efficiency. 2025 will be the year they feel the pain. It's Ironic. We obsess over KPI's for growth. And ignore the KPI's of decline. Until it's too late. An over reliance on retention short term can look amazing: - Save on ad spend. - Free up margin. - Free up cashflow. But long term the damage is done. Small brands get hit the hardest. Why ? Because customer loyalty is a myth. Your best customers are also your competitors best customers. And the smaller you are as a brand the less loyal they are. Think of it like a steam train. You have to put coal in the fire faster than you burn it. If you don't You slow down Then you stop. Then you need more coal. Marketing is the same. For some Retention is a survival strategy. Take Bloom & Wild , they have to slow down on acquisition after £100,000,000 in operating losses. Given the choice i'm sure they would focus on growing market share. Not losing it. So before you focus on reducing acquisition budgets, here are a few tips to free up some extra marketing budget: - Take a look at the incremental revenue of your retention campaigns. - Calculate the lift from your brand bidding on Google. - Incentivise influencers with TikTok shop comissions. - Adjust your media plan around key trade peaks. - Then take an Axe to acquisition. 2025 you will be grateful. If you're facing budget cuts and need help moving budget in the right areas, drop me a DM.

Most DTC marketers think running anything but sales campaigns are a 🚩 Here’s why they’re wrong. The majority of these campaigns add little incremental revenue. They look impressive. You want to spend more. But You're just giving away margin. The higher the ROAS, the more certain you can be. But the problem is : -> Brands don't understand incremental performance. -> Your agency isn't incentivised to teach you. So they hide behind Sales campaigns, DPA's and Advantage Shopping. That's the harsh truth. So what’s the real lever for driving incremental sales in a business? Upper funnel activity. Moving as little as 10% of your media budget into brand awareness will: 1. Increase mental availability 2. Drop your CAC 3. Showcase your brand to new audiences 4. Break through plateau's in performance 5. Drive Incremental revenue 6. Restore your faith in marketing If you’ve been playing with: -> Advantage Shopping -> Sales Campaigns -> Dynamic Retargeting And your platform results have no impact on revenue Try testing the power of upper funnel. See what happens.

Creative teams are burning out. And it's your paid team's fault. Things aren’t working... Request more creative. When that doesn't work ? Rinse and repeat, until the last drop of enthusiasm disappears from your creative team. Then content creation becomes a box ticking exercise. Gen-z call it quiet quitting. It’s happening everyday. The signs are obvious: Lot’s of logo overlays. Lot’s of copying competitors. Very little motion graphics. ZERO creativity. Talk about a vicious cycle. And your paid team are to blame. It’s office politics 101. It's called the blame game. And creative teams are tired of carrying the can for marketing's lack of strategy. It's so easy to avoid it. Here’s how it should work in a high performance team: - Constant Feedback. A creative brief doesn’t finish when the project management task is marked as complete. Empower your designers with feedback on how those assets they spent days of their life creating performed. - Education on data creative metrics. It’s marketing's job to explain the data and breakdown creative KPI’s like: Hook rates  Hold rates CPA’s. It’s then the content team's job to make improvements.. - Collaboration is key Running better marketing campaigns is all about collaboration, by working together you eliminate blindspots. You drive results. And everyone looks good. No siloes, just high performance.