Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Nikki Lindgren, founder and managing partner of Pennock, a paid media and SEO agency specializing in beauty and lifestyle brands. The conversation centers around leveraging paid marketing strategies to boost sales, particularly in preparation for the holiday season. Nikki shares insights on the challenges lifestyle brands face due to consumer behavior shifts, competitive ad costs, and the evolving digital landscape. She emphasizes the importance of having a strategic, full-funnel approach, especially for smaller brands, by focusing efforts on core channels like Google and Meta while considering emerging platforms such as TikTok. Nikki also discusses the role of creative assets, the shift towards machine learning-driven ad strategies, and the need for a 360-degree marketing approach. The discussion ends with predictions on the future of paid media, including more targeted audience strategies and personalized advertising.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on Core Channels: Smaller brands should prioritize channels like Google and Meta for paid marketing, tailoring strategies based on where customers are most active while cautiously expanding to new platforms like TikTok.
- Full-Funnel Strategy is Essential: A balanced approach with 70% budget allocation for awareness and top-of-funnel activities, and 30% for retargeting, helps drive growth without over-reliance on remarketing.
- Creative Quality Matters: Effective ad creative, particularly video content with strong hooks, is vital for engaging audiences. Creator-generated content and strategic asset augmentation can stretch budgets further.
- Integrated Marketing Boosts Results: Aligning paid campaigns with broader marketing efforts (e.g., email, social, PR) enhances effectiveness, as seen in successful cross-channel campaigns for events like National Fragrance Day.
- Machine Learning and Audience Control: There is a trend towards more audience targeting control within machine learning-powered campaigns, allowing brands to swing small and scale effectively by testing on specific, high-potential audience segments.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Nikki Lindgren LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkilindgren/
Pennock: https://www.pennock.co/
Bestever: https://www.bestever.ai/
Soona: https://soona.co/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:02.264)
Hey everyone, welcome to the seven figures and beyond ecommerce marketing podcast. hope that everyone listening today is absolutely crushing it and having a fantastic day. I am really pumped for our discussion today. So my guest’s name is Nikki Lindgren and she is the founder and managing partner of PENOC, a paid media and SEO agency for beauty and lifestyle brands. Now we do have some overlap.
You’re probably wondering like, why on earth am I doing this? But I absolutely love it. I love collaborating with like-minded people who have an abundance mindset. And, you know, I just like talking to smart people and figuring out how I can work with them and help them and those types of things. And so it should be a really fun discussion today. Our topic today is pretty timely as we are starting to go into the holiday season.
So it is going to be about how to effectively leverage the power of paid marketing to dramatically increase sales for lifestyle brands. I know a lot of these brands right now are kind of limping along. Like it’s, it’s a weird time to be an e-commerce business. I know I’ve said this in several episodes, like consumer confidence is down. We’ve got the election coming up.
Like there’s just a lot of weird things going on right now. In addition to it being October. And when October usually rolls around, consumers go into hibernation mode. They’re getting ready for black Friday. They’re anticipating the biggest sales of the year, the biggest, deepest discounts. And so they typically start holding back in October and anticipation for those sales in about five weeks. And,
really excited to hear what Nikki has to share with us. I hope that some of the things that she shares with us can help us all make October better than it potentially could be. so yeah, I’m excited. Nikki, thank you so much for being with us today.
Nikki Lindgren (02:16.53)
Great, thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Greg Shuey (02:18.92)
Awesome. So before we jump in, would you actually take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today?
Nikki Lindgren (02:32.354)
Yeah, absolutely. So my name again is Nikki Lindgren. I’m actually gonna take you way back. from this really small town in rural Minnesota and the town is actually called Pennock, which is the name of our agency. yeah, and so as I was living in rural Minnesota in the 90s, getting ready to graduate high school, I was so desperate to get out.
Greg Shuey (02:46.142)
Interesting.
Nikki Lindgren (02:56.586)
Luckily, I found an opportunity to go to college in San Diego and just felt like, you know, the world was opening up for me and it was my oyster and I had a ton of anabolic energy to just go out and conquer and do great things. I’m quickly tired of San Diego and moved up to San Francisco, which is the area I’m still in. I’m in the suburb of San Francisco, but it was here in San Francisco that I had my first real marketing opportunity, first with Cost Plus World Market, where I led the direct ticket, was part of the founding direct to consumer team.
Greg Shuey (03:23.005)
.
Nikki Lindgren (03:26.114)
e-commerce. It was fun to be on this really small team of six people trying to launch e-commerce and market e-commerce for the business’s first time in history after having like 200 and some stores. So really successful and really surprised me in terms of like the level of interest and excitement I had towards it. So I continued to work in direct-to-consumer, you know, up until this point we’re still mainly direct-to-consumer and what we do for our clients. I’ve been both
brand side in-house as well as agency side. So I feel like the experience I had really helped me understand what brands and what agencies do well together and where the opportunities were to kind of strengthen that connection. And that’s really what we tried to do here at PENOC is act as a proper extension of the brands and look at things from a little bit more of a holistic view than I feel like most of our brands have had with their previous agencies before coming to work with us.
Greg Shuey (04:15.337)
next.
Greg Shuey (04:21.039)
Sure, that experience with their agencies or even if they tried to do it in-house, Like they don’t have that depth of experience and expertise. That’s a really cool way that you position and be able to come in and help those people. That’s awesome. Are you ready to dive in?
Nikki Lindgren (04:26.124)
the
Nikki Lindgren (04:41.044)
Let’s do it.
Greg Shuey (04:42.248)
Awesome. So 2024 rolling into 2025, there are so many places that you can put paid media dollars these days. I mean, if you look at all the platforms, I’m just taking TikTok as an example, right? You can do TikTok ads. can do ads specifically for TikTok shops. Like where do you split that? You’ve got Metta, you’ve got Facebook, Instagram, you can send traffic to your Facebook shop.
or your meta shop, your Instagram shop, you can send it to your website. So I’m a big believer, especially with smaller brands, probably like sub two, $3 million brands in really focusing in and really focusing your efforts and not stretching yourself too thin across a ton of different platforms. So when you start working with a lifestyle brand and you start looking at the digital landscape, you know, competitors,
Where do you find the two most impactful paid media channels are for growth? And why are those the most impactful?
Nikki Lindgren (05:49.994)
Yeah, yeah, so I’d probably step back for a second and just kind of like answer which hopefully is obvious and your listeners are well aware of at this point. like, there is not really like a proper playbook that we follow. Each brand has its own like quirks and nuances, right? So like, we don’t take on a new client and say 50 % of the budget goes to Google, 40 goes to Meta, et cetera. So I do think at this moment in time, like,
Greg Shuey (06:02.0)
Sure.
Nikki Lindgren (06:16.662)
really understanding where the customer is going to be is probably the first thing to tackle in terms of growth. And even though I said where the customer is as a symptom of growth, like the initial pass is to get that awareness up, right? So we have so many brands that are in that emerging space of maybe under three million in yearly revenue. And we continue to kind of cripple opportunities for remarketing because the business isn’t growing.
and the awareness level isn’t growing enough to spend more on remarketing, which I know we’ll probably get into in a little bit, like budget allocation mix. But to answer the question you had, which is where do you actually find growth? You know, there’s a couple obvious players still in the room. So Google’s been strengthened a lot in 2023 and 2024 with performance max type of campaigns. And that’s where we see a lot of growth.
Greg Shuey (06:47.076)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (07:14.026)
I know Google recently released the capabilities of seeing within every campaign how many of the customers are new versus returning and the lag time between first touch and conversion. So there’s a lot of cool features there that can help marketers augment what they’re doing even in Google to be more awareness and less remarketing. So very excited about that.
And then Meta converts well. So I would say if you’re a new brand and you’ve got some budget set aside for paid media, those are two super obvious players. Like I don’t think anyone’s surprised to hear me say those two, but I would say the level that we need to dial into is where their customer is. Our brands that are a little bit more young and Gen Alpha, Gen Z, we’re doing a lot more.
Greg Shuey (07:51.386)
Stir.
Nikki Lindgren (08:04.926)
media buys and bigger media buys on TikTok, primarily pointing to TikTok Shop as you mentioned.
Greg Shuey (08:08.15)
Yeah.
Yep. Cool. I like that. and I think, you know, if anyone in e-commerce is actually paused for a minute and gone over to Google and typed in, you know, a search query for a specific type of product, the search engine results page looks insanely different from what it looks like six months ago. Right. And I think Google’s shifting and becoming like your shopping category page.
They’re starting to become your aggregated product detail page with product knowledge panels. it’s, it’s crazy. And I think as Google starting to make this shift that the power of, of spending on Google from a paid media perspective is just going to get stronger and stronger. It’s they’re almost creating their mini little shop. I was even looking at it yesterday and they’re getting ready to roll out. They’re probably beta testing it where you can buy right in the search.
I haven’t seen anyone who can click and buy right in the SERP yet, but I was reading about it and you can join, you can put your, your brand in on a waiting list to be able to, to, to test that. And so I will more and more brands start spending on Google. I think so is they’re leaning towards this kind of the same model as it, not necessarily a tick tock shop per se, but they’re trying to keep people on the SERP and they’re trying to give them all the information there so that they don’t have to leave the SERP and then get them to buy. And so.
Nikki Lindgren (09:11.521)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (09:40.131)
I see that potentially grabbing more media dollars, but yeah, just went down a rabbit hole there. I apologize.
Nikki Lindgren (09:46.966)
Yeah, no, no, no, that’s great insight. like, thank you for sharing, because yeah, I agree. Like they’re being really responsive to what’s happening on TikTok with all the search going over there. And I will say just to kind of plug like the new versus returning customer insights we can now get from Google, super compelling to see that even for branded search, right? Because oftentimes we as marketers are like, well, spend something on branded search. Like don’t spend your whole.
Google budget on branded search, but we’ve got a couple of clients where so many of their first time customers are coming through branded search and it just, it actually surprised me. I didn’t assume that to be the case. I was convincing my team and some of our clients to not feel the need to be always on for branded search because these particular brands were doing so well with their SEO.
Greg Shuey (10:19.031)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (10:31.604)
Yeah.
Yep. Cool. So if a brand is coming in, they’re starting from scratch. They’re just starting to dip their toes into paid media, paid marketing channels. Where do you think will be most impactful for them to get started? Like what should they do first?
Nikki Lindgren (10:55.754)
Yeah, so I think the first thing from a low hanging fruit perspective would be set up your Google Merchant Center or Google Merchant Center Next and get all the feed integrations within the paid platforms you want to be on live. know, feed ads sometimes seem like the less the least exotic of everything we get to do, right? But they do.
Greg Shuey (11:18.994)
They’re not sexy at all. They’re boring.
Nikki Lindgren (11:23.282)
Yeah, but they do convert so well. if there’s just like one thing a brand has time to do, I would say the proper feed integration, making sure that things are not blocked or disapproved for different reasons, making sure everything’s like super polished and optimized in the feed settings so that you could run P max even with shop only type placements on Google or run dynamic search ads on or dynamic
product ads on Meadow would probably be like the lowest level of fruit I would think through. And then building from there. So maybe you take a phased approach and the first thing is going to be get these feed campaigns up and running. And then the next phase could be like top of funnel video view awareness campaigns that you’re building a pool of folks to remarket to.
Greg Shuey (11:58.312)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (12:17.554)
Yeah, I like that. I definitely think there’s low hanging fruit there for sure. And then coming in with more of a full funnel approach so that you can start filling the top, driving the bottom, and then figuring out which campaigns you need to double down on the scale. So I like that approach for sure.
Nikki Lindgren (12:35.304)
Yeah, and Greg, just to add one more thing to that, I think this strategy I just mentioned is a great way to get leadership on board, right? Because like what you don’t want to do is launch something that’s going to have such poor efficiencies for the business that the business gets nervous and decides like, hey, this is not the right tactic to go after where with that catalog integration and catalog ads, because they generally are among the top performers again, even though they’re not.
Greg Shuey (12:51.806)
Mm.
Nikki Lindgren (13:02.74)
sexy. We want to take advantage of what we think will win while we’re trying to get buy-in from leadership.
Greg Shuey (13:10.009)
Yep, that buy-in is super important as you know. If they’re not bought in, they’ll turn it off tomorrow if they’re not seeing a return. And that is frustrating and very, very, very bad for your paid campaigns.
Nikki Lindgren (13:16.374)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (13:22.73)
Yes, 100%.
Greg Shuey (13:24.862)
Cool. So, it’s competitive out there. it is add costs are going up. Clicks are going up. You look at, you know, the average cost per click for some of these, commercial transactional type keywords, and it is just getting crazy. So like, what are some of the creative ways that lifestyle brands can really stand out in hyper competitive paid channels?
Nikki Lindgren (13:54.73)
Yeah, yeah, so, you know, this all goes back to creative. think creative is 60 % of what’s going to work or not work within a proper ad strategy at this point. definitely, you know, any brand that’s in kind of like the beauty or wellness lane, we find that video is always going to win. So within the video, the brand has to focus on that attention rate. So how do they get their three second views to impressions?
to be as high of a percentage as possible because everything after that is going to make the ad itself work. And so there’s a couple different tactics and hooks that we often use. A lot of these are kind of well-known in the industry at this point, but I would say like us versus them, some sort of comparison to the rest of the industry and named competitor, et cetera, generally works well. I think a get ready with me or come along with me in the journey of using product.
testimonials still kill it. And all of this can be leveraged through in-house creative or creator-generated content. But what we kind of shy away from is calling like creator-generated content a hook because the hook has to be like a concept of what’s inside it, not just to deliver the content.
Greg Shuey (14:56.35)
So thank
Greg Shuey (15:07.232)
So.
Nikki Lindgren (15:12.898)
So those are the things we kind of like tweak and think about to really maximize the first three seconds. Oftentimes we’re like stitching together, recommending a brand stitch together, different video ads so that we can make sure that hook rate is as high as possible or that attention rate. That being said, like within beauty brands, carousels still kill it when the seasonal collection photography and videography is really well done.
Greg Shuey (15:34.117)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (15:41.92)
really well executed. So when that happens, we generally find with fashion brands, carousels on paid social do work better than video, which is kind of surprising, feels a little dated. But while that continues to be the winner, that’s what we kind of push more volume in terms of creative variations from brands for.
Greg Shuey (16:01.408)
Got it. Cool. So a follow up to that is when a brand’s putting the majority of their their budget into paid, oftentimes they don’t have enough to be able to produce really good assets, really good creative outside of working with creators and influencers.
Are there some creative ways that they can do creative on a budget?
Nikki Lindgren (16:33.054)
Yeah, so creative on a budget. We find that the creator generated lean usually is going to be the most fruitful because we get to do whitelist or spark ads then and it allows things to look like they’re a little bit more natural and less from the brand. So I would say as much as you can get creators to do the work for you just by seeding the product and not costing you more money than that.
Greg Shuey (16:48.668)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (17:00.736)
go in that angle until you’re blue in the face. Beyond that, we’ve tested a few AI partners to just kind of augment and add some more jazz to our assets. Best Ever is a really good product that’s in its infancy that we use for some AI augmentation to our assets, both motion and still assets they’ve been a good solution for. And then, I mean, there’s so many shops out there, like Dilly out of LA is a common
Greg Shuey (17:30.782)
Hmm.
Nikki Lindgren (17:31.148)
with to create assets as well as Suna. So I think that there’s a handful of places you can find creative for as low as a couple hundred dollars per video. So we usually kind of understand the landscape of the brand, what they’re planning to spend in marketing versus creative for the marketing, and then kind of bring them to the appropriate partner.
You know, everyone’s in the gig economy now and there’s no shortage of people who can do really great things. So, you know, it’s really just the hunting for the right person.
Greg Shuey (17:59.912)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (18:08.245)
Got it. Cool. Thank you for sharing those. We’ll make sure to put those in the show notes. Could you share some examples of some campaigns or tactics that have significantly boosted sales for a lifestyle brand?
Nikki Lindgren (18:23.54)
Yeah, and I think, I don’t know if you or the audience is going to really like my first example, but I think it’s important to talk through because I do think like the, you know, the days of like the early 2000s when it’s like just run a bunch of ads on Metta and your business will succeed. And before you know it, got 15 million. Those days are just so long past us that it really has to be a fully integrated 360 degrees approach that
Greg Shuey (18:41.001)
Sir.
Nikki Lindgren (18:52.13)
anyone running ads is doing with the greater marketing team. So a couple examples I have that worked really well are examples of that really coming to life. So in the month of March, there’s a National Fragrance Day. Of course there is, it’s a national day for everything. And we had a brand in the fragrance space that was launching new product around that time. So we really built out a full month catalog in terms of new campaigns to launch.
Greg Shuey (19:10.741)
So, thank
Nikki Lindgren (19:21.63)
initiative. Was it picked up on other channels and other parts of their marketing programming? Yes, absolutely. Like it was 360, so we had a lot more creators working with us. We even had some billboards and certain DMAs. had press about it, so there were a lot of things that came together to make it successful, but I do think it’s worth noting because
Greg Shuey (19:35.401)
.
Nikki Lindgren (19:45.608)
When we’re amplifying as a full business and not just amplifying on a couple of channels across digital, know, the things work in our favor. And so through this initiative, we were like launching Spotify ads, which is something this client doesn’t normally do day over day. So we just had a really robust strategy and approach. And, you know, not only were the efficiency numbers where we expected them to be for paid media, because we were running on TikTok, Meta, Google.
Greg Shuey (19:47.637)
Thanks
Greg Shuey (19:53.429)
Yep.
Nikki Lindgren (20:13.474)
programmatic, Pinterest, and Spotify. But the business was exceeding their top line projections and their forecasts. So I think that’s an example of like all of the efforts are going to raise the business and calibrate the business higher. So that’s just one to share because I think it’s really important to have everybody think about the 360 approach.
Greg Shuey (20:36.008)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (20:36.212)
and then more pointed within the paved lane only, I think sometimes the tweaks of simplified structures, more machine learning to more specified structures where you are maybe toggling in the audiences and putting in the details yourself, sometimes switches like that and truly kind of resetting campaign structures.
are going to elevate the performance and give you some of those quick wins and learnings. So as much as we like to say, like, we want to stay out of learning, we want to keep steady-eddy with everything we’re doing, sometimes you have to blip the system to see better success. And so as we’re getting new collections to drop or creatives to drop, sometimes we’ll do that intentional blitz to ensure that we’re getting the right level of efficiencies out of things. But again, like, those are the tactics that, like,
mean less for the business overall because it’s just busy work. So I do think the idea of aligning with the email team, the owned and earned marketing teams, et cetera, is a much more holistic way to get the business to do what we want.
Greg Shuey (21:33.663)
Stir.
Greg Shuey (21:46.576)
I like those examples. especially like the first example. The more data you put into those pixels, it’s all machine learning, it’s algorithmic based. I mean, had this discussion with a client on Tuesday when we were talking about their search engine optimization and why it’s so important to be able to drive that organic traffic in, in addition to their paid channels, their email, their SMS. It all just works better. You get better results and all the rising tide lifts all ships.
Nikki Lindgren (22:10.55)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (22:15.072)
Exactly.
Greg Shuey (22:15.831)
I really like that example. with paid media, we talked a little bit about the funnel, right? Driving top of funnel all the way down to the bottom. So when brands are putting together budgets and planning out how they’re going to prospect, how they’re going to retarget, how should they do that?
Like that can be really tricky and really overwhelming for brands just getting started to think through that and figure out how do I attack each part of the funnel? Like how do you lay that out for your clients?
Nikki Lindgren (22:52.246)
Yeah, and hasn’t it become even more gray with advantage plus shopping and performance max? We’re kind of… Yeah, the general rule we like to follow is 70 % awareness, top of funnel, middle of funnel, and 30 % maximum true bottom of funnel remarketing efforts. And that has become more complicated.
Greg Shuey (22:57.93)
Yes, thank you. Thank you, you guys.
Nikki Lindgren (23:18.578)
with Performance Max and with Advantage Plus Shopping. However, there are still solutions in those walls that can be built to make it more one audience versus the other. But I would say that’s generally where we want to be with clear KPIs against each funnel position as best we can to land on this blended KPI, whether that be.
ROAS or CAC for all of paid media. And I think it’s really important to own and control expectations around each part because, know, and I’m sure you felt this too, Greg, like I can’t tell you the amount of times brands are like, just get me better ROAS. And I’m like, cool, we can remarket, but heavier. Yeah, we can remarket much heavier, but you know, are you focused on the efficiency here or do you want your business to grow because
Greg Shuey (24:01.229)
And that’s all we can do.
Nikki Lindgren (24:11.7)
If we remarket by the third month of doing this, like your pool is going to dry up and your business isn’t, you you’re not going to see that top line growth you want. So that’s, that’s what we’re kind of toggling when we’re building a media plan is making sure that we aren’t over fixated on efficiencies of paid media at the expense of the total business. So for that reason, we also monitor MER, marketing efficiency rate with our clients to make sure that that is kind of
sustaining if not growing in the right direction.
Greg Shuey (24:44.384)
Yeah, I think one of my favorite discussions to have with prospects is, Hey, you know, we were getting a, an eight or nine ROAS and we increased budget and my agency tanked our account. We’re down to like a one and a half. And when we dig in, it’s like, yeah, they opened up top of the funnel. Like, what did you expect? That’s not going to have as high of a ROAS as just driving retargeting and bottom of funnel. so,
It’s an ongoing fight, right?
Nikki Lindgren (25:16.136)
It really is. then I think like going, I know the next question wasn’t necessarily about like cookies and pixels in the future of retargeting, but like the more first party data within like meta you are collecting and building full funnels in like a meta or a TikTok, the better for this reason, right? And that’s why like video view as an objective type of funnel is so important for brands that have big enough budgets.
Greg Shuey (25:38.955)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (25:38.976)
because then we don’t even care if they made it to the website, right? It’s like kind of better if they don’t because then we can remarket to them and get them more engaged before they journey to the website or to our shop page. So we’re building a lot more full funnel on a single platform strategies than we ever have before.
Greg Shuey (25:57.629)
Yeah, I love that. Why don’t we just kind of jump into talking about that? Like, how do you recommend measuring all of this? Like, do you look at Facebook numbers? Do you look at GA four numbers? Do you use Shopify conversion events? Do you use a third party like a popsicle? Like what what what are you guys doing?
Nikki Lindgren (26:06.412)
going on.
Nikki Lindgren (26:20.426)
Yeah, so we are generally like our first touch is usually going to be platform data. So we’re going to look at that first as like our source of truth. We usually are doing shorter look back windows, right? Like on Meta obviously it’s seven days or one day, right? But we’re doing the seven day there. So that’s kind of like our first pass is like how are things looking there? A lot of our brands are integrated with Northbeam or Triple Wheels. So we’ll use that as.
that source of truth in the instance that they’re working with a vendor like that or a solution like that. We have started leaning more heavily on GA4 data. And even in the data-driven model, even when you’re not favoring just Google Ads, the numbers for paid social have just been remarkably low, like super concerning for brands to see some of these numbers. So that’s where we’re kind of saying.
Greg Shuey (26:51.315)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (27:14.374)
Yeah, 100%.
Nikki Lindgren (27:16.542)
Yeah, so if our brands are like, don’t trust meta because meta overstates will possibly land in the world where we’re like, let’s optimize for one day. And that way, at least we feel like we’re doing a better job of potentially under counting rather than over counting. that’s, well, and it’s not our favorite solution because many of our brands are a little bit more considered, right? It’s like a.
Greg Shuey (27:32.53)
But that gets messy too.
Nikki Lindgren (27:40.066)
two and a half to three day lead time before they convert. So it does get messy. And then I feel like, you know, I was just talking to a client about it yesterday. I’m like, I feel like we’re chasing yesterday because we’re looking at what happened the day before and we’re making wild changes to your account based on that. And like, we’re just in this constant state of responding and learning and never getting like out of anything for long enough to sit on it and see.
success come forward. it’s definitely not, I don’t think it’s a place to be when you’re trying to scale. And I think like there’s a ton of fear and scarcity in brand owner and brand executive world right now because we’re in September and it is a different September with the election and CPMs are much higher than they used to be. And I feel like the outlook for some brands are as a little bleaker and with that comes.
Greg Shuey (28:29.253)
Yep.
Nikki Lindgren (28:36.0)
all of these needs to look at things more carefully. And I just could not state differently that GA4 tracking is too understated for social to beneficial. And one day look back is also too hard to manage because you’re just in a constant state of responding.
Greg Shuey (28:48.55)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (28:59.246)
Yeah, it makes me wonder. And I brought this up a few times on the podcast is are we going to get to the point where we literally have to look at an overall marketing budget? Just like the days of old, right? Like, and say, is this moving my business forward in a meaningful way versus breaking it down channel by channel? And as we continue to get, you know, privacy restrictions and cook, like, are we even going to go to a cookie list world? Google just, you know,
Nikki Lindgren (29:15.915)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (29:28.249)
backed off that they’re not, they’re not going to roll that yet. And so like, are we going to get back to that point where it’s okay. We have to build a holistic strategy knowing that all these pieces play together and work together. And is that moving the business forward the way that it’s supposed to be? I don’t know. It’d be interesting if we ever get back to that place.
Nikki Lindgren (29:28.812)
to leave.
home.
Nikki Lindgren (29:44.704)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (29:48.204)
I mean, I’d like to get back to that place, but I think in talking to new brands who are either going to start investing much more heavily in ads or just trying to think about if we’re the right next team to help them with ads, it doesn’t really pass their sniff test to talk about M.E.R. No, they really don’t like it because it’s unfair for paid media to be like, we look at M.E.R. and as long as that hasn’t changed, we’re helping you.
Greg Shuey (30:04.719)
They don’t like it.
Greg Shuey (30:12.837)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (30:15.594)
So it’s kind of hard to find that like lane that really cuts through and makes the brand align with you and like feel that they can trust the strategies. And I think MER is still kind of a red flag for them.
Greg Shuey (30:26.916)
Yeah. Yeah. And this doesn’t even take into account third party marketplaces like Amazon, right? I’ve got a client right now where if we lower their Facebook spend, there’s a direct correlation to their Amazon sales going down. It’s like, this is messy, way messy.
Nikki Lindgren (30:35.298)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (30:47.574)
Yeah, it really is. And that’s fair point. Like us in the industry space, we hear that on a regular basis. It’s a weekly topic that I think we have with our clients. And so, yeah, with you on precisely what you just said.
Greg Shuey (31:05.869)
So we’ll kind of wrap up here with the next couple of questions. mistakes. What are common mistakes that brands make when they’re getting started with their paid marketing? And how can they navigate that and work to avoid those mistakes?
Nikki Lindgren (31:22.826)
Yeah, I think the first mistake which only the novices in the room are going to make is setting up a testing structure, even a campaign structure that’s intended to have one objective, but the actual inputs in the platform have a different objective. So I’ll bring this up and this irks me and some agencies do this or people and find success with it.
Generally speaking, if you’re setting up a creative testing campaign versus a business as usual campaign, they both should have the same audiences intentionally so that you’re learning from one and moving to business as usual. And they should have the same objective. So if you’re pushing out new creative and you’re not sure it’s going to win and you’re like, well, let’s test it against traffic, well,
If traffic isn’t your long-term goal, it doesn’t really make sense to test in a lane that is then going to be changed when you put it into your natural long-standing campaign structure. So that’s one of the icks that we like to avoid here. And I think the other one is probably just around understanding how to funnel people down because I think when budgets retract, often what we like to do in the agencies, like make sure
Greg Shuey (32:31.901)
It was in.
Nikki Lindgren (32:40.458)
like brand search continues to get the same level of love or like remarketing gets the same touch that it had before. But what often gets failed to be realized by people in the digital space is, if you don’t have that awareness, the budgets for all of these remarketing efforts do have to decline as well because otherwise you’re oversaturating and fatiguing the audiences. So I think those are probably the most common things is like they start with.
Greg Shuey (33:02.774)
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren (33:06.632)
I’m remarketing and they’re like, I can only spend a hundred bucks a day. And it’s like, yes, because no one knows who you are. And also I’m testing in a world I’m testing and learning things that are outside of my main core business objective.
Greg Shuey (33:19.937)
Yeah, cool. then wrapping things up, where do you see paid media going over the next few years? I know it moves fast, right? It changes so fast. What are you seeing? What are you predicting?
Nikki Lindgren (33:33.14)
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if you’d be in alignment on this, but I think one of the predictions I’m seeing is a return to a little bit more control around audience targets and audience inputs with PMAX. Well, I don’t know how many PMAX have really given us quite yet, but ASC is definitely opening up what types of inputs we can give around audiences. So excited about that. Also excited about the idea of just finding
your core customer tribe and, you know, oversaturating them intentionally with the idea of like looking very big to them and looking very much like in their face. So that can be geographies that can be like, you know, characteristics of the collective tribe, et cetera. But I do think there’ll be like a return to let’s be a little bit more intentional and aim small and, you know, swing small so that we can get some learnings before blowing everything out too.
people all over the country where that’s kind of been the machine learning play we’ve had now for two years. So I think that’s a good one.
Greg Shuey (34:37.441)
Yeah, it kind of goes and it goes back to one of my comments is like getting stretched too thin. So like swinging small, getting it dialed and to the point where you can start scaling and dumping cash and getting a good return. So I like that. Cool. I think that’s a good closing. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today. I was a really great discussion.
Nikki Lindgren (34:46.114)
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Lindgren (34:54.067)
Yeah. Love it.
Nikki Lindgren (34:59.33)
Great.
Nikki Lindgren (35:04.32)
Yeah, Greg, so happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
