It’s not so complicated: Omni-channel marketing for beginners

Joe Casanova: Hey how’s it going? My name is Joe Casanova. I’m the founder and CEO of Furlough. I’ve come from several industries and backgrounds, from E-commerce, to SaaS to Web3 to Real Estate, hospitality, even medical, which was my first startup. And I’m super excited to drop some value bombs and give you some insight to the space of what we got going on.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Joe, welcome to the Growth Mentor Podcast. I’m excited to learn from you about Omni-channel marketing. So could you tell us something that people over look when they deal with Omni-channel marketing?

Joe Casanova: Yeah, it’s funny because, you know, I have a community of a lot of marketers, and oftentimes these young drop shippers come in, and everyone’s eyes are really on ads, and how can we scale through ads and most of the time social media agencies as SMMA, all they think, is ads, and then, you know, they overlook some of the obvious channels, just like email marketing. And if you look at all these channels, they really work better together omni channel, and that’s the topic of today’s discussion. And omni channel strategies. If you’re doing proper email marketing, Google advertising, email marketing, influencers, content, marketing, native ads, affiliate marketing, SEO, all these channels, it actually increases your return on ads spent, across the board, so I hope to drop some more insights on the channel this discussion. So.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Great, great, thanks for the great start. So if a very, very early stage founder or quite newbie in the domain would come to you and say, Hey, what’s Omni-channel marketing? I understand it’s a combination of all those. How would you explain it further below them?

Joe Casanova: Yeah, I think it would be like the final stage, this is where you’re working towards is an effective processes and systems that complement each other. And ultimately, continue bringing your customers or prospects back to your website, because that’s the you know, at the end of the day, the website is where their conversion happens. And whether you’re ecommerce, SaaS or whether you’re a brick and mortar, there’s really three variables that go into this. It’s your audience, your creative and the most important your offer. I tell people marketing is not selling you putting the right audience offer in front of the right audience at the right time, because even your best customer is not your best customer all the time, sometimes people don’t want to buy. And that’s the beauty about remarketing, and how well it all complements with each other.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks, I actually learned what Omni-channel marketing means, like this was a great angle to get it started. So this person, which is quite new in the field, asks, like where to start from. So how should they prioritise their first steps? And what’s your approach on that?

Joe Casanova: Yeah, I think it asked, you know, a lot of businesses come to me, I do no outbound just to be clear. Why? Because my all my business are all inbound. And it’s all word of mouth referrals. I believe that good work gets you more work. And the best compliment you can give is referral. And about 99% of the time the first service I tell them to go all in on is email marketing. They all talk about advertising because they want to go and sell out inventory, bring more customers on so forth by email marketing, is the first thing you go after. Even if you don’t have a big list. If you just have 10,15, 20 people focus on those automations focus on the welcome series, focus on the post purchase follow up, focus on cross sell flows, these automations which are drip emails that send over let’s say, the next eight weeks, you could have an eight week welcome series, that once they sign up, they say hey, thanks, welcome to the brand. A week later, Hey, did you know that we have this. Hey, check out our founders. Hey, over the course of eight weeks educating so that once your automations are set up, they’re set up, you’re talking on behalf of the brand to these prospects. And then when you run ads to your emails that to get that opt in. It’s these automated sequences that are nurturing your audience. And really the goal is on E-commerce especially go all in on email scale, your email lists, and ultimately, you know, your skill your brand.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Will do bring one or two more practical examples like if a brand or someone you have worked for and you’re comfortable sharing more information about to understand to make them understand like how this would work together.

Joe Casanova: Yeah, so I was working with an influencer brand. I really enjoy working with influencer brands because they usually the one service I really do not like taking on a social media. Just because what you think you are what the client wants is always going to be different because it’s really subjective and interpretation of what they want. So, I always believe that strong brands especially in the E-commerce space, are LED social media wise or led by the founder. So these influencers they I was approached by a brand called peachy bump that we actually scaled in less than a year 300% over to 150,000 monthly recurring to 500,000 monthly recurring athleisure fitness female driven brand and their previous agency they had a falling out deleted all their automations so the first thing I told him they’re like we want to do everything with you. And I told him no, let’s just do email first set up these automations for the first two months, third months, we’ll switch it to campaigns nurture that list, nurture that domain so that your emails are delivering the following month like okay, we want to do everything I will relax and we did Facebook. Why? Because Facebook remarketing, we have an audience we have an email. And we could grab that email, create a look alike audience and just keep growing email like that the third month comes to like what else? We want everything. And I’m like Google, Google smart shopping, Google search, right? Get in front of these people that had the intent of actually looking for fitness leggings. And we started adding these channels that complemented each other. And then the next month came and they’re just like, okay, SEO, and I was like, why would you do SEO, I could tell you’re impatient, you’re gonna do SEO for six months, when you could spend that money on Google ads, and ultimately, rank number one for the terms that you were trying to rank for using SEO. So I’m not against SEO, it’s really a case by case of that niche, the competition, the original traffic, SEO done properly, can really I mean, propel business to new heights. So that example, was sufficient enough for.

Spyros Tsoukalas: More than sufficient, I would say. So I have been in this as of early stage founders that don’t know how to do most of the stuff that you mentioned. And I didn’t have a guy like you to teach me or guide me or like, work with me. So if a founder or a business owner that just started, like, wants to prioritise, what to do, what to learn, what to outsource, how to balance this equation, how would you encourage them to think?

Joe Casanova: I mean, you know, for sure, think long-term, I was having a conversation with a mentee of mine that wanted to get into affiliate marketing. And I told him like, Look, if you want to go short term, which right now the filming of this, it’s October, which means we have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas around the corner, I go, if you want to be you know, to test the waters with affiliate marketing, you can create a listicle, which is 10 best gifts for entrepreneurs, right. And then you get 10 affiliate offers to 10 different gifts, and make a list that you drive traffic to and if someone like me says I’m gonna buy gift from my entrepreneur, friend, I have 10 options that all kickback Commission’s to you. The problem is that right? There is a great experience to get, you know, get those reps in and actually build that marketing muscle to you know, find these skills and get better and bring them onto your next venture. The problem is really that it’s just short term, because it’s a holiday season, it’s just those two months. And after that, you have to figure out what the next thing is. And you know, my advice is really think more longer term, think more macro, think of what you could do today, that will ultimately be able to be reused and leveraged over the course of time. And that’s why I’m so strong on emails because you know, your email list or people that opted in to prospect to you know, they want to get marketing messages by you, or their people that have bought from you. And if you go all in on that that’s your highest targeted, that’s your best interested, hottest segment. And from there, you can repurpose that into obviously audiences that Facebook and remarket it and then to say, you know, it’s a travel blog or fitness blog, you can repurpose that audience to other fitness brands. So, thinking about how you can leverage this and really just make the most out of, you know, what you’re doing today.

Spyros Tsoukalas: How would someone understand that, like, on along this process, they have been like a bad decision or something doesn’t work? How would you? How would they identify that they are going in the wrong direction? And they should reprioritize things a strategy and get back to action as to spread the strategies you have been explaining.

Joe Casanova: Well, I mean, it’s let’s be very clear, you know, I’m saying everything, it sounds very easy when I explain it like that. But the reality is, it’s not, because if it was everyone would do it, and you’re gonna mess up, and you’re gonna have campaigns that don’t, you know, work, you know, it’s often with drop shipping. And I see this a lot people think drop shipping is just like, you know, free all opportunity that just brings so much money to you. There are people that get extremely lucky, where they put a creative up, they put a random audience, and it starts hitting and starts selling. But if it doesn’t, it’s like fishing, you need to get a nibble. And when you get that nibble you could kind of throw more money into the, into the ads and start reeling it in and work off that. But if you have no nibble on your creatives in your ads, then you don’t know what to work off. So naturally, what I’m going to tell you is like what marketers should do throw everything at the wall, see what sticks, what falls off? Don’t worry about it, what sticks. Keep going on that and keep going towards and you know, just a simple metric is return on ads spent. How much are you putting in? How much are you going out? And we have some clients are spending $10 to get a client like a $10 cost per acquisition a CPA cost of $10 to get an average order value of $90 plus or pay $10 to get 90. So what I tell them is increase the ad spend increase the ad spend increase the ads, why? Because naturally the more ads money you end up spending on the ads, the cost of acquisition is gonna go up because there’s just not enough people in the world and you’re also competing with competitors. So, find a nice sweet spot where you’re okay spending to actually get that return but ultimately, the most important metric that you should be looking at is return on ads spent.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Your energy is insane. Joe, thank you for bringing it to the Growth Mentor Podcast. So, last question for the day and I guess we can be talking about that for hours but like what what are your favourite tools? For starters, especially.

Joe Casanova: I mean honestly, I think the most overlooked tools are just the free ones Google Sheets, Google Docs, ClickUp is free. It’s a project management software I love is Zapier. I mean, Zapier. Yes, there are paid tools out there that can really, you know, go like Zapier is you get two apps and you make them connect and talk. And I use Zapier for everything, but you get free zaps, that could actually let automations take place. And, you know, I think software and technology is here to help us scale allow us to do more things. And every process that you set up and system you set up in your business, I don’t think you should immediately outsource it, I think you need to do it yourself, document the process, find software to streamline and automate it freeing up your time so that you can focus on other things, or just document the process and get a human to actually take over and do that for you so that you free up your time to do you know, other initiatives that complement that or support that. But I mean, when it comes down to tools, I can tell you that communication Discord, Google Suite is by far my favourite Google Slides, docs sheets, Google Drive for cloud storage. Zapier, I mean, Uber suggests I haven’t done SEO in a while. I’m not that much of a practitioner and SEO even though I do work with people that are strong in SEO, but from the little research I need to do Uber suggests is great Google Trends is just slept on, you can see what’s trending what’s talking, also going a little more, you know, granular into the trenches, go to Twitter, see what’s top topic, trending topics, go to LinkedIn trending topics, see what people are talking about, you know, news, hijacking is great when you see what someone’s talking about. And you kind of interject yourself in the conversation. And, you know, find a way to leverage that audience because at the end of the day, like I said, those three things, you have your audience, you have your creative and you have your offer, you have to find out where your audience is. And at this moment, Kanye West is doing some hot takes. And if you can inject yourself in that Kanye West conversation where that audience is, you can hijack that, you know, attention with whatever creative you put, maybe Kanye was drinking a cup of your coffee or something right? And when you have that attention now you got Kanye West fans or people are talking about I’m looking at Kanye West drinking coffee and then you redirect it to your offer, which is a coffee. So, finding out what’s out there and just what people are talking about the end of the day. These tools help you understand trends and trends are led by people.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Joe, thank you very much for joining us and sharing all these insights and experiences in such a short time. I really appreciate it.

Joe Casanova: Love it, my friend. Thank you for having me. That was a nice so rapid fire session. I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope to hear from you soon.