Navigating Modern Brand Marketing Challenges and Strategies | Angela Marsh

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Angela Marsh, Senior Growth Strategist at Venus et Fleur. Angela is a dedicated professional with a passion for data-driven solutions and strategic planning. She has been in marketing for over 12 years, working with small, medium and large businesses. Fun fact, Angela started her journey in radio marketing, an industry that gave her a thick skin and helped her to overcome challenges and find success for her clients. Angela thrives in leveraging insights to optimize campaigns and drive business growth. Her experience spans across various industries, allowing her to adapt and excel in dynamic environments. Collaborative by nature, she enjoys fostering cross-functional partnerships and leading teams towards achieving ambitious goals. Angela, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Angela Marsh: Thank you, David. I'm excited to be here. David McBee: I'm excited to have you. Before we jump into your expertise, let's just talk briefly about Venus et Fleur. Just tell everyone what you do. Angela Marsh: Yes, I get to do a lot of different things, which makes it very exciting, but the primary hat that I do wear is focusing on paid acquisition and how we can help achieve our overall revenue goals. So I am doing a lot of collaboration with many teams to figure out how different touch points with our customers to get them to purchase our beautiful products, which are real flowers that last a year. David McBee: Tell us just a little bit more about those real flowers that last a year because that sounds unbelievable. Angela Marsh: Yeah, so you might notice there's a few behind me. You can see some pink ones, maybe a purple one. But what we have here is we have Eternity flowers. So we did have the first original Eternity Rose, which is going to be the foundation of the business. We started back in August of 2015, and we've had a lot of growth since then. We've moved into more of the Eternity floral space, which is super exciting because we have more than just roses. We have hydrangeas, we have dianthus, we have calla lilies, we have orchids. We have a lot of really beautiful flowers. So you can have this statement piece in your house year-round, and it actually lasts a little bit longer than that. And you can make it just change the way a room will feel. Flowers are always going to be something that lightens a mood, and I think that with Venus, you're able to have that light beautiful feeling in every single room of your home. So it's a very beautiful product and I would highly recommend stopping by our site. David McBee: I can tell you're passionate about it. That's great. Angela Marsh: Yes, they're incredible. David McBee: All right, so now I want to pull some golden nuggets out of you for the Simpli.fi TV audience starting with this, what are some of the major challenges that you feel that brands encounter in growth marketing, and what are some of your favorite strategies to combat these challenges? Angela Marsh: Yeah, I think it's a really important discussion that we need to have here in 2023 because things have changed. As you mentioned at the beginning of this interview, I've been doing this for a little bit longer than I care to age myself, and with that, we're starting to see, we have to shift almost back to an older method of marketing where you're seeing TV is very important. So what has been very challenging with brand marketing is we were using all of these quick channels, meaning we were using things like Facebook and Google and Bing and TikTok and all the different paid acquisition channels that you're able to do to create this funnel. However, what we're seeing is that attribution is no longer going to be our source of truth, and there's multiple touchpoints that the modern consumer needs to take before they're ready to purchase. So when we're seeing that there's so many more touchpoints, it becomes very challenging with brand marketing to just dedicate all of your dollars to one channel. That's something we used to do. Now it's very important for us to make those pivots and look at all the other opportunities that are out there in order to build up our brand, then getting customers through the door to purchase. So some things that I'm able to leverage, I always am going to leverage Google Analytics. That's going to give me a lot of insights on my customers, where are they coming from, what kind of behaviors do they have? That's going to also give me ideas of places we might not be investing in, but they're still coming through organically. I also like to follow a lot of people on Twitter, so I can give you all of those later on in the episode. You can always put it in some notes somewhere. But what we're seeing is using platforms for attribution software is also very popular, so we can see what do our past to conversion look like. So I really like to use a tool called Rockerbox. That's been very helpful for me. And then I also have another software that I use to make most of my decisions, called Lifetimely. That is a software that's going to give me more of the LTV on different cohorts of audiences based on different time periods, but also by products. David McBee: And what tactics do you feel are the most effective right now in 2023? Angela Marsh: They are going to be storytelling through a full-funnel approach. So what I mean by that is we need to really be focusing more on the top of funnel. I think that for a long time in my space, not a long time, let's say in the last three years, which is a long time in digital marketing, it's been really important for us to focus on top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. How can we get in front of a customer and then re-target them until they're ready to purchase? People are starting to pick up more on what paid media is. iOS ... what was it, iOS 14. That really changed a lot for us. iOS 17 is going to be even a bigger change. So it's really important for us to focus on building up the brand and do more of a storytelling through our funnel. So that's where we're going to be utilizing things like CTV, utilizing different things on YouTube, utilizing different things on different social platforms where you're letting the creative really tell the story. And with AI, we have so many capabilities to save our time and get the right messaging to the right people. David McBee: You mentioned CTV. Is that a big part of your strategy? Angela Marsh: Yes, absolutely. So let's back up a little bit. We had mentioned at the very beginning of this episode when I came on that I worked for Venus et Fleur, and we are an Eternity flower brand. When you think of flowers, there are going to be certain moments where we're going to be busier than other brands. So we have what we call peak seasons. That's going to be during Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. So during those seasons, we capitalize on using CTV in so many different ways, whether that's going to be retargeting people. That's where we found a lot of benefit, is that we're doing a lot to focus on the brand, getting in front of them through different channels that I've mentioned throughout this episode. But then if we can get back in front of them with this video that really tells the story of Venus at Fleur, that's where we've found a really good return on our investment. In addition to that, we found really good placements within CTV on different types of private networks that are more aligned with those seasons. So during Mother's Day, that's going to be ... a lot of women are purchasing during that time, and maybe we want to get in front of an HGTV type of audience. So it's really key for us to have that flexibility to change our targeting at a very pivotal moment for us. David McBee: I find it really interesting that your first reaction to that was using CTV to re-target customers who have already been to your website. So many people think of TV and CTV as top of the funnel, but you're kind of using it at the bottom to bring home the sale. Angela Marsh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've just found that it has been very beneficial because with our product, it is a luxury product. It is extremely beautiful. However, people typically don't purchase the first time they're on our site. Sometimes it takes eight different touchpoints. So I need to make sure that I'm having that visibility on all the different channels, and part of that equation is having that in CTV. David McBee: I think that's fantastic. Is there anything else you want to share before we wrap things up? Angela Marsh: I think that it's really important to constantly be optimizing everything that you're doing, looking outside of the box. Don't just look directly into the data, like I love to do. Think of things that are going to make you uncomfortable because you might find that that's really going to help you be more efficient. You never know what's going to happen in 2023. And then stay up to date on different types of media through Twitter, through podcasts, or read books if you have the time. David McBee: I'm so glad you said read books. You probably know, I ask all of my guests if they have a favorite podcast or book that they like to share on their episode. Do you have one? Angela Marsh: Yeah. So I'm going to go with podcasts because that's the most digestible content for me at the moment in my life, and that is going to be perpetual traffic. I have found a lot of value out of that, and I've also learned a lot of different skills. David McBee: Okay, great. And what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you and or Venus et Fleur? Angela Marsh: You can learn more about Venus et Fleur by visiting us at www.venusetfleur.com, or you can always find me and connect with me on LinkedIn. Would love to connect. David McBee: Okay, perfect. Well, thank you so much for being my guest today. Angela Marsh: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. This was fun. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media-buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.