Video Transcript

[ 00:00:02 ]Hi there, good evening, or good morning, or good afternoon, wherever you are, whenever you are seeing this. My name is David Mendonca, I’m the co-founder and director of PunchUp, a growth marketing agency based in London, and today I’m going to talk a little bit about growth marketing, but not only. As the title says here, it’s the importance of what I call the all channels approach, more than specializing or going very hard on a particular set of channels. You need to understand how everything works together and really go wide on the importance of controlling, in a certain way, all channels in order to really push your brand further. And of course, this is based on my experience, my personal experience, the experience that we have with our clients, in PunchUp, and my personal touch in everything I say, of course.

[ 00:01:03 ] So you are very welcome to disagree with me and comment and let me know what you think about this. I don’t have a very long presentation, I want to be very straightforward and focus on the juicier bits, because that’s usually my approach anyway. So I have one slide to show you, and I’m going to talk a little bit about this topic for you guys. Okay, so let’s go. So this is my one slide. I was just about to correct a little something there. My one slide, and it’s something that, just to give you a bit of context, I created this slide seven years ago. And still today, I do quite enjoy it. I do enjoy it quite a lot. And yeah, it’s the old-fashioned funnel view.

[ 00:01:52 ] And I know nowadays it’s more trendy to have a circle, or a loop, or a Venn diagram, or I’ve seen even a sunflower to represent a marketing strategy. But for me, the good old funnel view never let me down. And I’m particularly proud of this slide that I’ve created long ago, when I was working in a smaller company and I was tasked at the time by my boss to focus very hard on a couple of campaigns. It was mostly all PPC. And we were going very obsessively over PPC campaigns. And I put together this graph just to show how there’s many other elements that we should be focusing on, or at least give a little bit of attention to in order to really succeed.

[ 00:02:45 ] Because the PPC, it is driving the clicks and eventually also driving the sales directly. But this is very short-term sort of results. And they have no continuity. They will end as soon as we stop putting money into PPC. And okay, they are delivering results, so let’s keep doing it. But should we not get ready for the future and get ready to really scale, scale sustainably, scale gradually, and scale efficiently? So this means decreasing the cost per acquisition and all of that, rather than always pushing for PPC campaigns. And I’ve developed this; one slide at a time, to really try to push for that conversation at the company I was at the time. And I did succeed; I did succeed. And it was a very proud moment for me.

[ 00:03:39 ] And it’s a little bit of this that I want to discuss with you guys today. And it’s also kind of the approach. Of course, nowadays I have a bit more modern slides to show with my clients. But it’s. It’s still a little bit of this approach that I’ve put with the clients that we work with at PunchUp, which is basically: We understand that budget is tight. And not a lot of companies will have budgets to focus on all of this at the same time. And they shouldn’t really. And also, no marketing manager, no marketing specialist will have a brain big enough to handle all of these elements simultaneously and perfectly. Right? So all of this is normal and all of this is understandable. But the key message here is: keep it under control.

[ 00:04:33 ] All of these elements need to be under control. And you need to understand, regardless of what you’re focusing on at the moment, that there’s all of these other elements that will need to be driving you and pushing in the same direction. So if you’re doing if you’re doing that one PPC campaign there, you really know that it’s going to deliver results. Remember of all the other elements that are connected. Is your website ready for all of that traffic? Is it at its best performance, its best shape? Is the design good? Is the navigation good? And once that happens, how’s the form performing? Is the form really working well? Is it validating phone numbers, whatever? All of those details. Is it integrated correctly with your CRM?

[ 00:05:15 ] Is your CRM automatically labeling it into the right groups and the right segments? Are those segments then triggering an automation? Are those segments triggering an automation via email marketing that sends a thank you email or a thank you email flow with two or three messages that keep that contact engaged? And if we’re talking about e-commerce sales, you’re sending the welcome email with a thank you for your purchase and what comes next. And are you then increasing the value of this database by asking more details? And so on, so on. So I could go on talking about all these elements, then all connect. Then all connect in one single story. And, regardless of thinking that, okay, then I need a mega budget to control all of this. No.

[ 00:06:05 ] It’s just gradually it is better in my approach to make sure that you have a little bit of everything in a good place rather than going crazy in one channel and going with all your budget in one channel. Either being people. Either being PPC or SEO or anything. There is no point in starting if you don’t control all these elements yet, or if you don’t have them in your head yet. Because you might have the most amazing PPC campaign or the most amazing SEO, bringing all the traffic, and the website might even be okay. But if you still don’t control what you do after the contact form submissions, what do you do once the contacts go cold? Is there like a follow-up? Is there like a system that brings them back?

[ 00:06:52 ] And in terms of the visits that don’t convert into anything, is there like remarketing a list being ready? Is there like remarketing campaigns? What tools are you using? Do you have a tool that can understand exactly the behavior of the clients, the visits? I’m sorry. And then deliver targeted ads to them so they come back with the right message and knowing exactly what they should be interested in first. So all of this stuff. It’s not about doing it all of the time, all at the same time. But it’s about understanding that in order to succeed, I need to gradually tick all of these boxes, tick all of these systems. And if we go in levels, we need to make sure that every channel is in level one before we go into level five into one of these channels, if you know what I mean.

[ 00:07:44 ] So put every channel in the baseline in level one. And then you start proceeding. OK, then I go level two on this, this and that. And then all of them in level two. And then we go level three. So trying to simplify here, of course, that it really won’t bring the best results in terms of scaling. And I focus particularly on small and medium businesses that sometimes, sometimes budget is tight, and that’s the urge to generate results quickly. And they might dump all of their budget into PPC. And then they struggle, and they get frustrated. Why? Why? All of this money went down the drain, and nothing was really generated from that. And you can say, well, it was the PPC agency that wasn’t good. Sometimes it might happen.

[ 00:08:36 ] Of course, there are agencies that sometimes aren’t good, but it’s it’s everything else: was the website really ready for all of that traffic in terms of the content interesting? Were the products correctly sold? And and sometimes as well, more than more than the technical part of it, more than the our campaigns being correctly implemented. Is it is it does it make sense? Does your website is written in a compelling way as in as in a human way, as in a conversational way? Are you really being interesting for someone who visits your website or is it just something that looks very structured, very templatey? It’s like in everything. It’s a cell. A cell is a conversation and the website is no different.

[ 00:09:24 ] The website should be approaches as a story, as a story that has a conversation that leads them from reaching the website to converting and explains and more than explains. It convinces the user that making that purchase or choosing you for whatever service is the right thing to do. So it’s not with jargon. It’s not with the super punchy, super punchy. Headlines or anything like that, that you’re going to get it. In our opinion, it’s about building a story and building a brand that is compelling and really, really resonates with with what people what people were searching for. And and that is something that you develop again across all these channels from the first ad that the person sees to your website, to your welcome email, to your follow up email, to your remarketing ads, to your happy birthday email, to email, whatever, whatever you do.

[ 00:10:19 ] All of this is connected. Okay. And and there’s a lot of other topics. If we could dive into into this funnel. So, for example, like market research or or even AI that comes into play and and all these other things like behavior analysis with hit maps and tools like Hotjar or or Crazy Egg and the way you segment your contacts. This is crucial as well. Like you need to get as many information as you can from your website visitors, your database. And there’s a numerous of ways that you can do that. You can do this. And and all of that will once again feed into your your PPC campaigns, your SEO and all of that will work much, much better because you are considering the whole thing, the whole picture. So.

[ 00:11:04 ] So the end. Yeah. Like I say, so the message here is, is that for me, my opinion, and that is the key takeaway from my short, very short participation here is that don’t focus on one channel. Okay. Don’t focus on two channels or don’t focus on three channels. Just understand that it’s the whole thing that matters. No brand, no company will scale long term successfully and sustainably more than anything. Sustainability in the way you grow is very important. Or at some point down the line, you’re going to crash. If you rely only on one channel, you are going to crash at some points, more likely than not. So by building all of these pillars and all of these channels, and everything connected, you will for sure assure that, or secure a more sustainable and more safe way of growing and scaling your company.

[ 00:12:01 ] Okay. And as some sort of a final thought, you don’t have to know all of this, all of this expertise. And you even you might not even have the budget to hire someone who has all of these expertise, or a team that can cover all of this expertise. But what you can do is get training more. You can get consulting, of course, but you can also get training and upskill your teams to make sure that, like I was saying before, at least you reach level one in all of this in all of these channels and all of these elements. Just get the training that’s good enough. That takes your team to be good enough to handle all of these channels. Okay. So more than focusing on, I need to hire the best specialist.

[ 00:12:46 ] I need to hire the that one guy that is always there. The one who’s always talking on LinkedIn about this and that more than this is like looking at your internal team and believing that these people as well can learn to understand better. And they can be trained to, to add more to to your company, and be able to see the old picture. And this, my little old school funnel, here. And this is no, no, no. Science marketing has evolved a lot with AI and a million of new tools we have available. but the principles are the same and even though this is seven years old i don’t think any of this is

[ 00:13:23 ] outdated here and there’s i think all still all of this funnel makes sense today okay and and that’s why i’m bringing it here it’s all about having everything connected and when you and more than putting all your eggs in one basket is putting one egg in each basket even if it’s a tiny egg in each tiny basket and then the more you grow the bigger will you’ll make the baskets and uh and it’s about that and and get someone to to train your teams start by more than start more than spending money on hiring new people uh on um fancy new tools start by looking at your team and uh and assessing the the skill gaps that that is and potentially identify one of it one

[ 00:14:14 ] these two of these three five of these elements that you probably are not so good at the moment and get some training get someone to come from the outside and train your team and like fill those gaps that can take really the team forward without a big budget without a big investment because in my case i focus mostly on small and medium businesses and startups that need to control every penny of their of their budget and more often than not they need guidance they need training rather than investing crazily on new tools or new people so this is my message like i say i specialize in growth marketing for small medium businesses and

[ 00:14:59 ] for us the approach is everything counts and we’re not going to say that you need a SEO you need a PPC you need everything and let’s put together the best strategy to take you to from where you are which can be 50 60 40 to have a hundred percent even if it’s not amazing a hundred percent you have a hundred percent control of every single element and then you can grow and you can scale you can add more layers and you can reach level 99 you know in all of these channels one day okay i hope this little chat was useful i kept it very straightforward no no jargon not getting very technical and uh and if you’d like i’m happy to share my little my little pet slide uh this one i will forever be showing uh because it kind of changed a little bit my the course of my career and uh and it’s a bit of a personal one for me so i hope You enjoyed this, uh, this bit here with me, and, uh, and any questions, you can; you can talk to me. Okay, see you, thank you.