Jonathan Becker: belief

Transcript context

…Do you have any just rules of thumb for someone listening and trying to decide, is paid a real model for us, either on LTV or CAC, or payback period? Or something just like, here's what you probably should have, especially early stage for you to feel like paid growth is going to be a great lever for you to use, and maybe a primary lever. Product market fit. If you know that your business sells into audiences. Let's say you are a social media influencer or you had a really strong email marketing game, or organically your content surfaces within Google search results. Or, you did a lot of direct mail and linear television and billboard advertising and that worked. If other things work, it is highly likely that paid acquisition will work. The issue for most companies is in this incorrect assumption that the data that is provided through paid channels allows you to have full end-to-end understanding of attribution. Which is wrong, it's never been that way. And the other aspect of this is the patience to understand that every business is unique, and these metrics that we know are important are different for every business. Lifetime value, like propensity to repurchase, ROAS, which is return on amount spent, CPA, CAC, all of these different things are different for every business. Even if I worked with two hotels in the same city, they would have different results based on the nuances of their budget, their brand, the market that they sit within, the services that they offer, and so on and so forth. I think that everything else, the main problem here is that nobody should expect an overnight turnaround with performance marketing. It is a very difficult channel to manage, and that's why people hire experts like us to help them with it because it's a never ending problem with constantly changing issues. It's always been like that, that's not a new thing since pandemic, or whatever. And it will take some time to work out what works. I have this framework of there's these four growth channels, basically growth engines is what I call them. There's paid/performance marketing. There's SEO, there's virality in their sales. And essentially there's some companies whose growth is almost primarily paid. A few that come to mind are booking.com, which we know well at Airbnb, which is almost all paid growth driven. Credit Karma comes to mind as a classic paid performance marketing. I keep coming to paid growth as my term, so I'm just going to stick with that. TikTok initially was very performance marketing, paid growth oriented. Wish was another one I think about. And I want to talk about how much things are changing within this realm. But before we get there, do you think there's still an opportunity for startups to emerge where they get to scale almost exclusively through performance marketing? And this question actually came from Twitter, someone tweeted this randomly the other day. And I was like, oh, that's a great question for Jonathan. And by the way, her name is Liz. And I was like, oh, that's a great question for Jonathan, and by the way, her name is Liz Georgie asked this question, so there you go.…

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