Marketing Happy Hour - Performance Marketing 101 | Alex Lewis of Later

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

This week, Erica has the privilege of chatting with Alex Lewis, Performance Marketing Specialist at Later - a social media management platform and link in bio tool that our co-hosts LOVE! (Scroll down for a code that will unlock 2 months FREE!) Alex drops all of the knowledge she's gained during her time working in performance marketing, reveals how Later utilizes ads to round out their full funnel marketing strategy designed to drive user acquisition and growth, and shares some absolutely mic-drop-worthy career advice. Here's a peek at what we cover in this episode: [00:04:04] - How Alex's agency experience set a solid foundation for understanding the customer journey and where a brand enters it. [00:09:44] - The key skillsets needed in performance marketing, including the understanding that past performance does not indicate current performance, the flexibility to endure constant changes, and the ability to remain "scrappy" in testing strategy. [00:16:18] - The benefits of starting with just one ad channel and getting a solid foundation on it first, then building one by one to reach "well-oiled-machine" status, and the importance of knowing where ad spend is going when communicating with your team. [00:20:34] - How Later activates their full funnel marketing strategy, and the thoughts behind their recent launch of Reels and TikTok scheduling. [00:22:48] - The conversion metrics that Later uses to determine success and their LTV (Lifetime Value) to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. Alex also reveals her predictions for performance marketing moving into a "cookieless" future. Grab a drink and listen in to this week's Marketing Happy Hour conversation! ----- Other episodes you'll enjoy if you enjoyed Alex's episode: Yes, you CAN work full time and get an MBA. Here's How. | Emma Wolgast of Red Ventures Your Guide to Social Media, Paid Media + Influencer Marketing | Halie Soprano of Traackr ____ Say hi! DM us on Instagram and share your favorite moments from this episode - we can't wait to hear from you!  Please also consider rating the show and leaving a review, as that helps us tremendously as we move forward in this Marketing Happy Hour journey and create more content for all of you. NEW: Check out our website! NEW: Join our email list! Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lewisalexandra/ Use code "LEWIS2022" for 2 FREE months on Later's "Starter" plan (expires Feb 2023): https://later.com/pricing/ Follow MHH on Instagram: https://instagram.com/marketinghappyhr Follow MHH on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketing-happy-hour/ Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing Happy Hour Weekly: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/marketing-happy-hour-weekly-6950530577867427840/ Join our Marketing Happy Hour Insiders LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9238088/

Hey there, welcome to the Marketing Happy Hour podcast, where each week we're learning career-defining advice, powerful social media strategies, unique creative tips, groundbreaking influencer marketing tactics, and more from marketing experts that represent some of the world's leading brands. Let's dive in. Grab a drink and join your hosts, Cassie and Erica, for this week's episode. Erica and I were just off the record geeking out about today's guest. Alex Lewis, performance marketing specialist at Later is joining us on the show. Later is one of our absolute favorite marketing brands, literally

ever. But anyways, you might be asking, what is performance marketing? According to Spotify, performance marketing is a type of digital marketing campaign in which the budgeting and decision making are driven primarily by the measurable results of that campaign. Performance marketing is based on an active, iterative feedback loop. Run campaigns, see what works, double down and repeat. Alex peels the curtain back on her role in performance marketing and key strategy and career tips she has for other marketers. She shares the importance of testing, building onto your strategy as you go, and which analytics to monitor when running campaigns. She closes out her interview with some mic drop advice for avoiding burnout. And don't we all need that? You ready to dive in? You know the drill,

grab a drink and let's get into it. Hey, Alexandra, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing well. I'm so, so excited to be speaking with you and to hear all about performance marketing. That's something that we haven't dived that much into on the podcast quite yet. We both love the company you work for later. So we're really thrilled to have you on the podcast this week. But before we jump in, I have an important question for you that we ask all of our guests and that is what is in your glass tonight? This is marketing happy hour after all. Yes. So it's actually three o'clock here. So I'm not quite onto the happy hour portion of the day quite yet, but I do have a coffee with a pumpkin creamer in the spirit of fall. So

what pumpkin creamer is it from like Trader Joe's or something? No, I'm in Canada. So we don't have Trader Joe's. I knew that. Oh my God. Oh good. It's like a special one. It's just milk, pumpkin creamer and it's like sold out everywhere. Yeah. I know. That's still so good. I over here, there's like a viral video that's going viral on TikTok or viral sound. My go-to drink is a Negroni, but there's like a viral sound that's like Crony Spagliato with a little Prosecco in it.

I have to like have that on the podcast. But I did use the gin that one of our past marketing happy hour guests actually gave to me. Her name's Amy. So shout out to Amy. It's very, very good. And then also I have a, I don't know if you can see it, but it's like sparkling. Do you see how my gosh? Yeah. Okay. So there's this company called art of Sucre and they have like cotton candy. They're like a cotton candy luxury brand and they have cotton candy glitter bombs. And so it's like edible glitter. So I'm getting fancy over here. I love it. Oh my gosh. Do they ship to Canada? I don't know. That's a great question. We'll have to look that up. But Alexandra or Alex, I would love to hear, you know, a little bit more about your background,

how you got started in the agency world, what have been some of your favorite projects, and then what do you focus on now at Later? I know that's a lot, but just a little bit of your background and what you really love to do. Yeah, for sure. So I'm based out of Vancouver, Canada, and I went to British Columbia Institute of Technology. It's a polytechnic university that's focused on trades. And I studied marketing, marketing communications there. So it's not like a traditional university where you take like English class and you focus on literature or social sciences or anything like that. Like my English course was a communications course where we learned how to build our resumes and how to interview and how to write hard emails and stuff like that. So it really kind of sets you up for the business world. And that was a

two-year diploma that I did. And right at the end of that, I did a three month internship at the strategy internship at cassette. It's a creative marketing and communications agency where I really got kind of like the foundation of looking into like user research and like the why behind we do it, like why we do everything in marketing, like understanding like the whole customer journey, where they're at at every single stage and like where the brand needs to come in at certain stages. So that really kind of set the foundation there. After that, a teacher and mentor of mine connected me to an agency owner who worked at a digital agency. She owned a digital agency called Patio. And yes, we did have a lot of happy hour meetings on Patio. You would have loved it. Yeah, it was a very small agency. And it was digital marketing focus. And

that was not necessarily my focus in school but that's where I learned everything I know about social media and digital advertising I spent three over three years there and I wore every hat I could possibly find I did like everything from social media marketing to copywriting social ads google, Google ads, account management, reporting. I built Shopify and Squarespace sites. I did influencer sourcing, onsite activation. I set up a Google tag manager. Yeah. I even bought newspaper ads at one point, which was additional ask, but it was for a certain client. And yeah, so essentially did everything under the sun there and throughout that time I was just reading later's blog because it's so focused on like how to you

know how to show up on social and like all different strategies and as someone who like only did like one or two digital courses in school this was a really great resource for me to learn from and I just like love their brand so when I saw they had a performance marketing role posted I applied immediately and I've been here for the last year and a half so yeah it's been really exciting so cool would you say that your agency experience you know having a hand in all of those different areas of marketing really prepared you or helped you understand what you kind of want to do in the future yeah definitely I mean I feel like it was kind of want to do in the future? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I feel like it was kind of like I got to try so many different things out and

understand like, do I really like this? Do I want to run down this path and become more of a professional and like more expertise with this certain thing? Or like, do I not like this so much, but I have like a better understanding of like a full digital landscape as a result of it. So it like, honestly, it set the foundation for my career. Totally. I learned everything that I know from there and I can build off of that foundation with

like new knowledge kind of thing. Oh, I love that. That's so cool. I know a lot of the past guests that we've had on this podcast have also had agency experience and they always say that that's like the best place to start if you're not entirely sure what you want to do. Like, that's just, you get such good experience from agency world, even though it can be a lot, it can be tough. But you know, you kind of just fall into place where you want to be. What attracted you to performance marketing? Or did you kind of just see that open? And you were like, something I've done before I'm totally in? Yeah, so I actually kind of just see that open and you were like something I've done before I'm totally in yeah so I actually kind of fell more into this ad role in the agency job and I was doing a lot of

Google ads for non-profit clients because they have a Google ad grants program where they get ten thousand dollars of search money every single month where they can drive traffic to their website and like get more donations or sign up for their newsletter or anything that was going to help their non-profit perform with access to funds that they wouldn't necessarily have and I was also doing a lot of social ads so through like meta or pinterest and whatnot so I found myself doing more of that focus and I originally had started doing like just social media management and like shout out to all the social media managers out there it is such a hard job it's like you're constantly shifting what you're doing and you don't necessarily know the answer as to why like something did really well or did really poorly

whereas in performance marketing there's an answer for everything you can see it in the numbers so I think the creative side of my brain and the analytical side of my brain just fuse together in this like performance marketing love child that I just, I really like because again, there's an answer for everything and you can figure out why something's performing so well and then like pump the gas on that certain thing to get the results that you want. So yeah, I think that's kind of how I ended up here. Yeah, that's awesome. That's so cool. It is so, so true about social media management and like not ever knowing like if your next post is going to succeed, especially when you've got pressure from like higher ups going, why didn't this perform? Why did this perform? Like, and you have no idea it's, it's

crazy. So highly, highly like love that you're in performance marketing. Cause I feel like that is just so great. If you have like an answer for everything, like you said, um, I know our next question is like, what are some of your top performance marketing tips? I feel like that's so broad, but if someone's just like starting out in the performance marketing space, what are some of the key things to learn and make sure you develop a skill set in? Yeah. So this is going to be a long answer. I love it. Let's go. I think first of all, just like be a sponge, like learn as much as you can from your manager, experienced growth marketers, and anybody else on your team, no matter if they're on like the pay team or if they're on the development team or customer success like you'll you'll get so much of a fuller understanding of pay just by learning the

full spectrum of how everything works so especially like I find from the team I learned there's a specific way of like how everything is working because it's specific to our brand and our tech stack obviously every company is going to have a different tech stack they're going to have different challenges so I found just looking on the internet for information you get a lot of like very vague type things and it's very general and like maybe something you've learned in school already or something you might already know but it's a little bit harder to learn from the internet versus learning from your peers and like your colleagues and your manager and whatnot so I've learned so much from all of my past bosses or our colleagues or

anyone. So I would say start there and like learn as much as you can book like monthly one-on-ones with them. So you can pick their brain or, you know, add like development calls with your manager. So you can focus on your development. All of those things are really good to start with. The next thing would be past performance, like does not indicate current performance. So for example, like using the tech industry as an example, in 2020, so many tech companies saw the best performance that they're ever going to see. Because for example, with later, everyone is at home starting businesses and they need social media, like software to be able to run their business. So we saw crazy, amazing performance

and, you know, obviously it's 2020, we're going into recession. The market is completely different. What we did back in 2020 is not necessarily going to fly today. So it's about just knowing like, yeah, we run this ad in the past. It didn't work in this foundation or this market. It doesn't mean that it won't work or it might mean that it won't work again so it's all about kind of like testing and having an understanding of what's going on in the market to be able to understand if it's going to work or not for your for your team um another thing is things are constantly changing and just just to be on top of it and just know that like things are going to constantly change so for example like if you're running ads on google search for example um another competitor can start

bidding on your keywords and all of your costs like your cost per conversion can just shoot right up and you have to kind of just be able to understand how you can manage that whether that be like lowering your bids or like shutting your campaigns off for the moment if you if it's really like that bad and being scrappy with certain opportunities obviously like there'll be times when I guess certain opportunity pops up and you might not have the resources on your team to be able to like fully do like a full campaign but understanding like what do we have can we like copy a certain campaign can we like do we have existing assets do we have landing page copy that we can use for ad copy like it's all about just understanding like how you can be scrappy with it and being able to put something out and take like taking advantage of an opportunity um another thing would be looking at the full experience

of your customer user so when you work in paid you are obviously one I almost like look at it as like a relay race in a way where you have you're on one team and then you pass the baton to the next team and the baton is the user and it's they're going along as as you go so paid might not be the first touch point might be the second one maybe like say like blog someone coming to the blog organically is the first touch point might be the second one maybe like say like blog someone coming to the blog organically is our first touch point and then we retarget them later with an ad and we're sending them to the landing page it's understanding when they get that ad what happened where do we send them and like what kind of environment do we send them to so for example

like if we're trying to get them to sign up for a free trial ensuring that like the copy on the ad is similar to what's on the landing page so we're not talking about two different things so they don't get confused making sure that there's something like a call to action button so that they can actually easily sign up and it's like very clear to them like what they're supposed to do because if you're just spending money to send them somewhere where they get very confused that's where you can see a lot of ad spend that gets lost and you lose efficiency there so it's about that and then also what happens like once they sign up for the free trial are they having a good free trial experience or are they dropping because like there's something that's missing so it's even like looking two steps ahead to make sure that you're not spending money on something that's maybe needs a little bit of tweaking on another team's end.

So that cross, that cross collaboration piece is so important and it all kind of comes back to the user experience. Like what do they need? And like, how can we fulfill that void kind of thing? And I'm like halfway through my lesson. Oh my gosh. I love it. You are literally nailing it on the head and I think you just through my lesson oh my gosh I love it you are literally

nailing it on the head and I think you just need to keep going I'm just going to sit back and amazing okay um next would be testing like test test and then test again you can test everything you can imagine like if we're running like a search ad you can test different ad copies you can test different keywords you can test different landing pages um with obviously with something like meta you can just test different like ad creative you can swap your ad creative um do a ton of different av testing um even same with like location you can target different locations and see like am i getting a better like cost per conversion in like Canada versus US like should we shift more budget there and it's honestly just about testing testing testing because when you

test you learn more and also understanding that when you do a test and it flops it's not a reflection on your performance like every test is like we don't know what's gonna happen on the other end of the test and a negative test result is actually so important because it tells you like what you should not be doing yeah and informs your future testing so just continue to test as much as you can because that's where you learn if you stay the same you'll never unlock those like those big opportunities that could be making you a ton of different revenues so continue to test and show your managers that you're testing because they will, they'll love it. And they'll think that you're super scrappy. And you'll honestly unlock a lot of amazing insights that can,

that can really like unlock the paid program. So that's super important. Another thing is when you're looking at like your ad channel mix. So for example, like we're running on like google search um display youtube meta pinterest tiktok we did not start with all of these like we i think we started with google search and it's about testing on one one ad channel and setting the foundations so strong there and not starting off with five because as soon as you start off with five then you have it's almost like having like a bunch of chickens and they're just running everywhere and as one farmer you're trying to keep all your chickens in a row and it's impossible so it's better to like set the stage with one nail it and then expand to something else make sure you have the resources because as soon as

you don't have the resources to take care of these ad channels that's where you can like overspend in places you're not supposed to be spending, especially if you don't have the team to support you or you don't have an agency to support you. And you're like, say like you're a one or two person team. It's just knowing like what you're capable of doing because in a role like performance marketing, you do get a lot of questions when, you know,

say performance is not very well, you will get the questions of like, where are we spending? And like, you need to know what's going on so if you have too many ad channels it can get out of hand but again when you're when you're nailing your ad channels and you know exactly where spend is going and you know your strategy is strong and you have a testing framework and you're refreshing your ads constantly that's when it's like a well-oiled machine but it's something that you build on one by one like we just launched TikTok ads we hadn't been doing that for since I started at least so that's like our fifth ad channel that we've added on after many many times and we have the resources to support to support that love that yeah and And second one, keep reviewing what you're doing. This kind of goes hand in hand

with your, with your ad channels. Always just be looking at your ads and like how they're performing, what audiences are, you know, engaging the most, which ad channels are performing the most. You have to know what's going on because again, like you will get, this is a, this is a role where you get a lot of questions from your your executive team from investors from the board so knowing what's going on and also it's a great way for you to understand like what we should be testing so as soon as you're losing that like knowledge of like everything that's happening obviously it's hard to know everything that's happening as a single human who's running like a large paid program but knowing enough about what's happening everywhere that you're able to

then make plans so that you can like address issues or perform optimizations or really push when you're seeing really great performance ask yourself always like could this be improved with paid you can always squeeze more out of it so it's just about knowing like where you can squeeze and then the final thing is in this again in this role with paid acquisition it's very revenue and finance focused so we always prioritize ourselves based on like revenue impact so in a in a brand side role it's like it's very easy like you have tons of time what's the most important thing we prioritize ourselves based on like the revenue impact of a certain task and like, what's going to, what's going to drive revenue. And like, if we launch on say like an

ad channel, is it really great for brand awareness or is it actually going to drive revenue for us? So it's just asking yourself, is this a fun idea because other marketers are doing it? And like, we want to be like, I don't know, like do a link along TikTok or is it actually going to drive revenue for us? So there's a big difference. And it's hard when you come from social media, cause it's all fun and like brand awareness and impression and views and engagement focus to shifting over to like, is this going to make the company money?

And is it efficient with the budget that we have? So those are my, like, that's my big long list. Oh my gosh, that was incredible. If you were listening, and you didn't just take notes on all of that, pause this, go back, take some notes, because that was incredible. Thank you so much. What tactics are you currently using to help later grow? What does a day in your life kind of look like? Yeah, so I can't really obviously give away our secret sauce because everyone would copy paste. But I guess I've been currently running ads on Meta, Pinterest, and Google and Google includes search display and YouTube as well as Microsoft ads. We run a full funnel marketing strategy.

And what that means for people who are listening is there's a top of funnel where you're fulfilling new users who've never heard of your brand before and then you have your middle of funnel people who are considering your brand and then the bottom of the funnel where these are people are the closest to converting and all of these different ad channels have different roles within this full funnel marketing strategy that's designed to drive user acquisition and growth. So we do that, but really like we could not do the job that we do without the entire later team. It's basically one big growth loop in a way without the, like I always say, like you can

run the best ad in the world but if the foundation sucks you'll never see any performance so without the entire marketing team like we have like a brand marketing team we have a social media marketing team we have so many different teams customer success happiness the development teams without all of them we couldn't be able to promote later at the standard that we're able to promote it so really like at the end of the day it's really just about listening to our customers and what they want for example like putting out new product features we just launched them real scheduling tiktok scheduling people have been asking for that forever those are things that bring people back

into the app we do add campaigns to remind people Hey, we have this new feature to bring them into the app. So those are different little things that we do for growth. But again, like we always are trying to squeeze efficiency out of every paid program or every paid campaign that we do, but we need the rest of the teams to be able to make this, make this happen. Yeah. That's so important. Especially like if one, you know, side of the teams to be able to make this happen. Yeah, that's so important, especially like if one, you know, side of the team is not performing as, you know, the well-oiled machine that you chatted about, like it can affect the whole thing. Totally. Let's chat a little bit about analytical reporting. What are some of the data points that you utilize with, you know, stakeholders or leadership to share how you're performing?

Yeah. So like I said, we're measured based on revenue. So what that looks like for us is free trials and paid plan signups. So I'm constantly looking at like the cost per free trial, the cost per paid plan signup and looking at the lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio to understand if we're efficient or not. Generally, like for every tech company or every company in the world, it's kind of a three to one ratio.

So it's kind of trying to get as close to three to one as you possibly can. The higher you are, say if you're like five to one, you're leaving money on the table. If you like five to one, you're leaving money on the table. If you're two to one, you're still money on the table for you to take. So it's about having this like I talked about this funnel earlier, and it's kind of like this big math equation. So if you hate math, maybe this is not the role for you. But it's understanding like, what what is the cost per paid plan sign up for every campaign and how much money you're putting into that and how it kind of feeds into this overall like final number for the paid program. So always

looking at that, but obviously there's other metrics in performance marketing or just in paid advertising that are super important, such as link clicks, link, link click through rate cost per click. And then looking at even like the quality of those people coming to your pages. So like the time on page, you can see these through Google analytics, um, pages per session bounce rate. Um, some people even have like, they can see where people have gone on the, on the, um, actual page. And then again, like those conversion metrics that I talked about. So those are, those are some of them, but again, like it's easy to, it depends on like your actual goal for your team. Like if we were focused on brand awareness, I would be talking about different metrics, but because we're focused on conversions and like revenue and whatnot, this is kind of what

I look at the most. That's awesome. And you mentioned Google analytics, aren't there courses out there that you can kind of take for free to better understand google analytics yeah I think google actually offers a google analytics course a certification of some sort yeah I think so that would probably be a great place to start if somebody is looking to like go into the analytical side of things because I know I had like one course on it I think it might have been through like LinkedIn or something and it opened a whole world for me it's so funny I keep seeing on LinkedIn all these people posting like you have to understand I'm a you know all these emojis that are like creative marketer not a all these emojis that indicate like analytics and like math and

stuff marketer and I'm like that's so true like if you have never had the exposure to like analytics or things like that it's such a different world like especially as you mentioned earlier like coming from social it is such a different world I know when I was in a social media manager role sure we had like touch points on KPIs that we needed to hit and things like that and we learned learned how to like measure that. But the majority of your time is spent on like content creation and then, you know, better understanding, of course, through analytics a little bit, you know, how things are performing because of the content you're putting out. But like, for the most part, it's just creative, creative. So that is such, you know, just like the difference between the two is crazy.

And I was like, as you're, as you're like talking, I'm like, wow, I should really dive into that more. Cause I need to learn, I need to learn even more, especially as you said, it's always changing. So love this, love this conversation. Yeah. I mean, like, to be honest, it's hard to be like a full fledged, like all the way through marketer like even when I was in my social media management days there was days I'm like I was not so much a

content creator like social media manager I was more like a social media strategist than like you know someone who like writes the copy and like plans the content and like plans the campaigns and whatnot but actually like doing the whole like recording of everything I was like that was not like my strong suit. So it's so hard to be everything in marketing. So it's just easy to just focus on what you're, what you love and what you're passionate about and just run down that path. Such good advice. Couldn't have said it better myself.

What would you say are some of your like predictions for the future of performance marketing? What are you currently kind of testing? I know you mentioned testing a little bit or exploring what industry trends are you seeing? I know there's a huge focus right now on like emerging platforms. I guess TikTok is like no longer an emerging platform, but a lot of brands are still just catching up to it. I know you mentioned you guys just recently started doing some paid ads on there. So what predictions do you kind of have around the future of performance marketing yeah so I mean like I think we're seeing a lot of like more like content as ads and then in the past it was very much so like static image headline cta click now buy my stuff yeah whereas now it's kind of like more like maybe brand marketing used with performance marketing.

So I think we're going to see a lot more like influencers ads ads or like creators in ad content. So like that's something that I've just seen a lot in terms of like new ad channels. I know that Be Real doesn't have ads, but they have to monetize at some point. So I'm sure that they will at some point everyone will be very bad but what is it um American Eagle do you guys have that in Canada yeah we do okay I like never know um we were talking earlier you didn't have Trader Joe's I don't know if I know you used to have Target do you have target anymore no we kicked it out oh I know I don't know what happened oh we all loved it I know so weird maybe they'll come back maybe they'll come back yeah American Eagle just you know launched on be real I think I saw that like maybe a couple days

ago I don't know what their strategy is and I think I saw like one be real that they did and it was like holding up a pair of their jeans I don't know what the strategy is but that is so interesting to me oh my I didn't know that brands I guess it makes sense but I didn't know that brands could like get on be real but it's probably kind of defeat the purpose yeah it's probably either they had like internal conversations with be real to like try to be the first one on there or it's like through an employee. Like, I don't know. It's very interesting to me. For sure.

But yeah, at some point I know they're going to have to monetize because they have no monetization at this moment unless they have crazy investment backing. But yeah, I'm sure that there'll be new ad channels that pop up. And again, like it's up to like a like a performance marketer to understand like do is everybody just jumping on this bad boy again and should we jump as well does it make sense for us is it efficient or like should we watch how it plays out like that's kind of what happened with us with TikTok where we're watching how it was playing out for everyone in terms of advertising they really still are setting up their advertising space so it's still like new for

advertisers but not new for just like users kind of thing in terms of like other other things that are coming for performance marketing obviously we all know that like we're coming towards like a cookie list future so in terms of like targeting with ads and like retargeting and whatnot data privacy and like all that kind of stuff is gonna to become a lot more complicated. I'm sure in the future, I know that there's certain like rules coming down the pipe or they have been for a while. So it's just on performance marketers to like stay updated on the conversation and just

make sure you're setting up your company or you're like whoever you're working for, for success so that you don't have a halt on all of your campaigns one day. So that's coming eventually. So looking forward to that. Yeah, that's so interesting, especially to like, everything in the metaverse and things like that. It's so funny. Like, I feel like whenever we try to talk about that, I just don't have a good understanding of it. And like, I don't know any marketer that really does unless they're like day in day out, like learning about it. But that's probably an area too. Who knows? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. The retargeting thing with pixels and cookies is going to hurt the most. Like,

how am I going to know that I still want the shoes that I looked at last night at midnight? Crazy. Okay. Alex, because you're growth focused, I just thought it'd be fun to chat a little bit about some strategies that you could see working for marketing happy hour as we're trying to grow. We might be coming into some ad spend budget, and we're just very excited to start putting more, you know, more marketing happy hour out there. So more people can find us. What tips would you have for us? Yeah, for sure. That's super exciting that you're going to come into some ad money.

That's where you can really play and start to grow your brand. So I would say start with something like Meta or Pinterest ads. Start again, start with one and then learn what you can from there. Learn from your audience there and expand onto the next one. Meta and Pinterest are perfect for both of these. They're very like image focused. You can incorporate different videos. Like for example, like you're recording us on Zoom right now.

You could always take a little clip of that and people love these like raw edits. So it'd be a great little hook to get them to listen to the whole podcast. And then even if you had like a little website, no matter what that was, you can drive traffic there and get people to sign up for an email newsletter. And then you can start another kind of growth loop through your email newsletter there. So there's a couple of little tips for you. Yeah, I love that. I think so in one of my past roles we used later, I like made them transition over to later because I was like, is amazing it's so easy to use and it's just like visually appealing which is important to me and it's also got it also yeah

yeah it also really has like good analytics and like a really good grasp on like all the tools that a social media manager or even just any marketing team who's putting content out there needs. So anyway, just a little plug for later there. But I remember using like the link in bio feature. How does that, does that, do you have any like ads out there that you guys put out there about the link in bio feature or is it kind of just like there? No, we actually put out a ton of ads about link in bio because sometimes people don't know that link and bio is later. So sometimes it's kind of like acts with this only standalone product.

So people, people don't know what it is. So we'll constantly promote, like have your own like mini website, link and bio. Cause people always do like hit the link in my bio and they know that they know that saying, but we just kind of have coined it with the product. So we'll constantly run ads about Lincoln bio. And then they come to the page and like, Oh, there's a social media marketing platform. And then they, you know, learn more about later. They sign up for the newsletter.

They enjoy the blog. It always like, there's always some sort of one touch point that brings them in. So sometimes that's Lincoln bio. And sometimes people only use Lincoln bio. Like they don't want to schedule. They just want the Lincoln bio. So, wow. That's good. Yeah. Okay. Alex shifting gears just a little bit. What are some of your ultimate career goals? Where do you kind of see yourself in five years or so? I know that's like the most cliche question ever. Like I never, I never liked when

somebody asked me that, but if you have any insight or any like career aspirations, I'd love to hear them. Yeah. So I'm going to be so honest here and probably expose myself a little bit, but I'm convinced that there's probably some people out there that feel the same way as me, but I honestly just chase opportunities that feel right to me in the moment. I'm so big on intuition and chasing what's right for you in that moment like I'm a constantly evolving person and I can't expect the person in five years to be the same as like what I am now what I do know is like I have a foundation set to succeed in my career and I just have to trust that I've done the work to get me to where that I need to be and I can change it

at any time like for example like I was wanting a change when I worked at to be and I can change it at any time. Like for example, like I was wanting a change when I worked at the agency and I was a huge later fan and love their branding, love their marketing, love like the values that they promoted as a company. And I saw that they were hiring for a role in performance marketing. And to be honest, like when I applied for the job I had this like voice in my head that was like this is your job so yeah so crazy right so I'm just I'm not a big like five-year ten-year planner I never have been and it's always kind of been like a little bit of like a fear of mine people ask me this question I'm like oh my god like is it not career oriented to like not have a you know an idea of what I want to be in five or ten years I

just honestly I always think like if you just follow your passions and your values you'll end up where you're supposed to be and I just I can't tell you what it's going to be for me in five or ten years like really like just my ultimate goal in this career is to make an impact on like people the teams that I work with the brand that I with, and to always lead with like amazing work and like ethical advertising behavior. And of course to just run some really cool ads. So that's all I can tell you about the five-year question. That's honestly incredible. I think more people need to hear that. It's okay to just be like following your path and not knowing exactly where that's going to go.

I haven't really shared about this on the podcast quite yet because it like recently happened, but I reached a point of just like total burnout in my career. And I was just like, what am I going to do next? I have no idea, but I knew at that moment, the right decision was to leave my corporate, my corporate job. And so I did. I don't know how it happened, but like, not even two weeks later, I landed my first consulting client. So that's all to say, thank you so much. All of that to say, like, you're completely right. What's meant for you. We will find you. I know that sounds like a lot

of like woo woo, whatever, but like, it is so, so true. As long as you're staying true to yourself, you're following your passions. You're like following your like intuition, your heart, and like knowing where you just want to be as a human, you'll end up where you need to be in your career. I think that's super important for people to understand and something that like not a lot of people talk about because it's so like, oh my gosh, like you have to know this big plan of like how you're going to work your way up the corporate ladder, how you're going to end up as CMO or what you're going to do next or like what company you want to be at or whatever. But you're so true. So true. Yeah. Yeah. we do this thing at later where um people leaders will ask people if they want to be a team leader or if they want to be an individual contributor which

just means that like they're just like a professional what they do and they don't have any desire to be a team lead but they want to keep like progressing in their role and being that like professional and like really like expert in that whatever that role. And like, I just think that's really great. And like more companies maybe need to do that because I think that there is like this pressure from like the executives or like from like HR, from whoever that you need to be working towards the manager role.

And like, if you want that, that's amazing. But if you don't, like you can be this individual contributor kind of thing. Oh my gosh. I love that. It sounds like later it's like the best place ever to work. Is it like so fun? Are you remote or are you in office? We're remote. We're completely remote. We don't have an office and we have, we have teams, we have hubs,

one in Vancouver, Toronto, and then one in London and UK. But we have, we have people kind of all over. Like there's someone on my demand generation team that's down in Mexico. We have people in Singapore and Spain. We have people all over, honestly. That is so, so cool. I'm still such a huge fan of Later. Love everything that they do. All the content they put out, all the ads, of course,

give you credit. Amazing. Finally, we're wrapping up here. We'd love to ask this question on Marketing Happy Hour. And actually, I know we featured you in our Marketing Happy Hour weekly LinkedIn newsletter, where you answered this question already, but I would just love for our listeners to hear it if they haven't caught up on our LinkedIn newsletter. Is there anything that you know now that you wish that you knew when you started your career? Yeah, there's definitely so many things. But I think one of the most important things was like, I mean, I when you're fresh out of school, and you're like,

you're in your first job, all you're trying to do is getting as much experience as you possibly can. Because all you see are these job descriptions where it says like must have like this skill this skill this skill this skill this many like this many years of experience and it can feel like there's so much pressure to have all these things and when you're fresh out of school you don't really have those things yet so when you get into your first job I just took on every single project that I possibly could when I was at the agency and there was no one that was pushing me to take on all these things like it like my boss was very supportive of whatever I wanted to do and she really wanted me to take on whatever I wanted

to pursue but I just became this like yes person and not yes in a good way like yes in a toxic way because I only had a plate that was like, say like a medium sized plate at work. And I was packing it with like an XXL list of things on this plate that I was trying to do because I was so concerned about learning every single thing. That's how I ended up doing like everything I listed at the beginning of this podcast, like editing websites. That was not my job, but I wanted to learn it because I just wanted to be this person that just knew everything but what can happen is like a few things you can burn out really quickly because then all of a sudden you you realize that like this doesn't fit into an

eight-hour workday um this fits into a 24-hour workday or longer or longer yes um what else can happen is you become a jack of all trades and a master of none so you know a ton of things like the surface level of these things but you don't have an in-depth understanding of how they work so those like those are one of the two biggest things that can happen and it can also like have an effect on like your main work because if you're taking on extra things and they're affecting the main work then that's a problem because of course like these are extra things for your development and they're not they shouldn't be affecting like your day-to-day work so making sure that you have capacity for it so making sure that you prioritize things if you decide to take on an additional project that's going to get you a new set of

skills deprioritize something else and have that conversation with your manager like again my my manager was really supportive I just never had that conversation with them because I was just like give me all the stuff yeah so definitely do that um that kind of leads into the next thing that I put down here development does not mean taking on more work it can really just mean like focusing on a certain side of your development and it doesn't need to be on more work it can really just mean like focusing on a certain side of your development and it doesn't need to be like extra work it can really be like a course with work it's something that ends in like a week or something that ends on that day like it doesn't need to take up more of your work day than it really needs to um and another thing is close

your laptop at the end of the work day and do not work on sundays yeah like the sunday scary like when you work in agency for example and you've loaded your plate like i did sunday scaries can really get to you but thing is like we're not saving lives to be honest we work in marketing things will things will go on the world will go on so it's better to prioritize your rest and like your life outside of work, because obviously during the work day, there's no stopping the work, but you can stop it on the weekend. So close your laptop, have fun, hang out with your friends, go to happy hour, and then kill it at work the next day. Yes. Oh my God. Such good advice. I love that. And you know, I am such a huge proponent of boundaries.

And so I love that you hit on that because I remember like in the beginning of my career, I was the same way. I was like, Oh my gosh, I need to take on every little thing that comes my way, whether it was like my manager or like somebody else in the company needed to help on something totally different. I was like, I need to do that because I think my dad always taught me like, be the one that they can't afford to lose. And like the way that you kind of do that is through like being that indispensable resource to like everybody in the company, but which is, there's a good element to that, but you're right. You do need to set boundaries on like what you actually can take on. And like, you want to make sure that you're able to do the actual job that's in front of you

and then focus on other things that can help out the company as a whole. Totally, totally agree with that. Well, we're at the end now. Where can everyone find you follow along with you follow along with later and everything that you guys are up to over there and I know there's a special offer coming I would love to hear about that too yeah so you can find later on Instagram at later media I think it's the same handle for our TikTok our TikTok honestly okay I don't want to plug later too much, but I personally love TikTok and the social team kills the TikTok game. So go check it out. You can find me on Instagram. My handle is at Alex Liu underscore. And you can connect with me on LinkedIn after I'll send the link. And I also have a code for

everyone. So the code is Lewis 2022 and Lewis is spelledw-i-s not the other way and it's two free months on our starter plans so you can get access to a lot of cool features that we've just released like scheduling reels so that you social media managers don't have to wake up at 5 a.m and hit publish it'll just go automatically you can schedule your tiktoks and get access to any new features we have coming up so definitely check that out it expires in February, 2023. So hop on it and enjoy. Incredible. Thank you so much, Alex, for joining us today. You hit so many good points. I'm so excited for this episode to come out. Like I cannot wait for, I think comes out in like a couple of weeks, but I cannot wait. And thank you so much for that code that I seriously, if you're out there and you're

listening, you've never heard of later or you've heard of it, but haven't like played around with it at all. Please take advantage of that. It is such a good platform. If you've been on other platforms, I mean, I have explored so many other platforms. I did an entire like research project on platforms and later was one of like my top platforms. So if you are out there and you are looking, take advantage of that free trial. I think that's an amazing offer. So thanks again,

Alex. This is amazing. I hope you have a great rest of your night. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Alex for joining Erica for today's episode. I have a full sheet of notes from that conversation. If you loved this week's episode, don't forget to leave your feedback with us in the rating section of your favorite podcast app. And if you don't already, give Alex and Later Media a follow on social media. And while you're at it, don't forget to connect with our community online at Marketing Happy Hour. Appreciate you being here with us today. See you next week.