PurePerformance - Building the right thing: Learning from digital marketing expert Bernhard Dominguez

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

“If I wouldn’t measure it I wouldn’t know it!” or “Build, Measure, Learn! ”These quotes could be from any engineer building new digital services, observing them in production and based on that learn how to improve their software.They are however from Bernhard Dominguez, Digital Consultant at FACTOR, who we invited to the show. Bernhard highlights a lot of parallels between his work planning and executing digital marketing strategies and the world we live in: designing, operating and optimizing complex software systems.Tune in and learn about how important it is to understand your real target groups (=end users), how to define clear goals (=SLOs), how to change from campaign to funnel activities (=User Journeys) and why it is so important to get an outsider’s opinion before implementing your next big project! (=We have always done it this way) If you want to follow up with Bernhard and his work check out the following links we discussed during the podcast:Bernhard on LinkedInFACTORPodcast (German): Newsletter MarketingPodcast (German): Build - Measure - Learn

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Saturnalia, Happy Krampus, Happy Saint Nick, Happy Yule, Happy whatever the hell you want to celebrate. Happy, just find happiness today because everything sucks right now. And speaking of not sucking and someone who I always know only to be happy, one of the most positive people I know, Andy Grabner. Hey, Andy.

Hey. I'm surprised that you know that many happy things to say about all these different holidays. I'm a man of the world. Yeah, you did the things on Google Research earlier. That's all. And then you were reading off the script. No, I learned about Krampus and St. Nick Day yesterday, but the rest I was aware of. The modern Christmas celebration is based off of Saturnalia, which came out of Rome.

That was around this time. Because history lesson, Jesus was not born on this time. Yeah. It was more born on this time. Yeah. It was more like in the spring. The Catholic calendar, it's also very hard to explain that Mary gets pregnant on the 8th of December and then she gives birth three and two and a half weeks later. Hey, don't question it. Real fun other fact, right? There are some great YouTube videos out there about Christmas and all. It was banned for

a lot of times because it was a real big drinking holiday and people would be going to get pubs and getting trashed and then cause havoc among town. It didn't come back into favor until Charles Dickens' era. But it was banned left and right. Crazy. Crazy history. This freaking holiday that's taken over everything.

Hey, Brian, quick question to you. Do you want to do a show solo with me or shall we actually give our guest a chance to say something as well well I know our guest has been is fueled up for the recording so I think it's time

to maybe let him open the throttle and see where it takes him why don't you go ahead and introduce him yeah I will. Bernhard, I will let you speak in a second. I just want to say one thing. It's a pleasure to have a friend of mine on the podcast today. And the interesting thing is we've known each other for several years now because we both have a big passion in life, which is salsa dancing and Latin music.

And interestingly enough, in August, I all of a sudden get a Facebook posting where it says Bernhard Dominguez is doing a podcast, a German podcast. And I translate the title or something like Build, Measure and Learn. It was about digital marketing campaigns, what we can learn from it.

I thought, that's really interesting. I didn't know about this. I didn't know that Bernhard is doing this. And I said, listen's really interesting. I didn't know about this. I didn't know that Bernard is doing this. And I said, listen to the podcast, then talk to him. And one of the parties that we met later on, I said, I think we should do something together. You call him a friend. Yeah, you call him a friend and you didn't know. I know.

It's really interesting. Yeah. Not the details. And this is why I think friends let friends speak when it's time to shut up and let friends speak. Therefore, Bernhard, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. And you say something. Also, like introduce yourself.

Okay. Thank you for letting me speak. And it was a great time till this moment. I love being guests on this podcast i'm thinking about preferring listening to you to you to you guys because it's a lot of fun in terms of being friends it's all about the passion so we meet each other on occasions like dancing, having fun together. And it's normal that you don't talk about your daily business life. But in fact, I already knew sometimes earlier about your business.

And for this, I was thankful for speaking to me about these topics because I also think that this is very interesting to make an interchange between these branches, between these fields which can be, can sound different but in fact if you are thinking logically or have a strategic approach, there could be a lot of things in similar. So let's see what we are going. I'm in the online business, let's say like this, now about 20 years. My first mail address is from the 93, something like this. So I did a lot of jobs and always with the focus on online digital, online marketing, online communication. And nowadays I am part of a marketing branding agency and usually I call me the conceptual

brain in the digital branch of my agency. So if it comes to talk to new customers about new projects, I'm the first one to show up and to get in touch with them and to search for what they think they need and what we know they need after the talking. So, and that's my part to get deep into the needs and bring the solutions what we can offer. The strategic and analytic approach of our agency is one of the things I love most because you can go into a topic into a business and understand it very very quick and that's all about in all you need to make a good job at the end so bernard I I want to point everybody that understands German also to the podcast that you did. We will put the link to that podcast in the summary and the description of this podcast.

Translated, it was called Build, Measure, and Learn, as I mentioned in the beginning. And when I listened to the podcast, there were a couple of things that were just blowing my mind because they're so close to the work that I do and also Brian that we do right we we measure well let's say first we start with building we're building things we're building new software we're building new features and then what we are what we should do if we're doing things right we put it out there we measure to figure out how does the software run? Is it used? Is it performing? Does it work well? Does it crash all the time or what does it do? And based on that, we learn.

And then it's kind of like a continuous loop until we get to a system where we say, actually, we built something that actually provides exactly the value that we want. In my world, though, and in the last couple of years, Brian, how many years have we been talking now about SLOs and SRE? Oh, two, three now? I think those are becoming the topic, right? Yeah. So, Bernhard, in our world, we talk a lot with our clients,

with our people about SLOs, service-level objectives. And it's about you're building a new service and you need to figure out what is the objective of the service? Because otherwise, how would you even know if your service runs as expected? And for me, the most striking thing is, and this is also what resonates well with what you said on the German podcast,

is the toughest question always is, or the realization is that most people don't know what the real objective is they always have a hard time saying uh i don't know tell you tell me what is my objective and i want to let just turn learn from you a little bit when you approach new clients as you said and you're working with them through a digital marketing campaign and trying to figure out the first i guess initial goals what are your findings? What are your questions that you ask?

How do you figure actually out what the real objective should be? Normally, they came up and said something like, we need a new website, or we are searching for an agency which do some online marketing campaigns for us. And they think that's the goal. So, no, never. And our first step is organizing a kick-off workshop. We prepare these workshops very well and send a huge list of possible questions in advance to the clients. During this workshop, normally two or three hours, something like that,

we are going through this bunch of questions and discussing them. And the most important thing for us is to understand deeply how the business works for our customer. What is the business case in matters of SWOT analysis? What do they want more? what are they afraid of, what they want to approach in the future. Things like that. And after that, after understanding the business of the customer, we are going into the target groups and this next big thing because normally they say yeah our customers are young women with interests in blah blah blah you name it and they think that's a target group but in in online marketing you have very detailed options and possibilities to target.

You have to have in mind the different mindsets the target group has. For example, they don't know your company, not being aware of your company, of your services. So people like this, you have to introduce your company. Or on the other hand, if you're thinking in a sales funnel, people who are searching a lot for exactly this solution and want to buy it now, now, now. The claims, the messages you send to them will be totally different. And it depends on so a lot of things, not just about the personas, but also

on the time, on the channel you sent the message, and so on. So we go through in this workshop, through these topics to understand deeply the business of our customer and to understand and develop an understanding together of the target groups. And often, often, often it's like, oh, okay, we were not thinking a lot about this. Now we understand it better too, because you were going with us through this. And this strategic component of our approach is a very important step to have a valuable basis to do the work after that. And after this understanding of business and target groups you can go into what they need these

people. What they want, what do they wish, what problems do they have. And it's very different on these small target groups they have and after that you join all your knowledge about the business of the customer the target groups and their needs and at the nearly end then you transform this into messages then you go into customer journeys which match perfectly on the business case match perfectly on the personas on the target groups and that's the base for thinking afterwards on now what we're going to do because perhaps it's that the website is not so important perhaps it's more important to generate a basic

awareness or more context via newsletter marketing so on so which channel we choose which campaign setting we choose depends a lot of the concept after this workshop so there's so many parallels again yeah i took a lot of notes and one of the things that you said um in the very beginning you said sometimes they think they need a marketing agency right because that's we need a marketing agency and it's like b, it's the same with the say, well, we need SLOs because somebody told, Google told us we need SLOs. Well, SLOs is just a means to actually solve a bigger problem. Right.

And oftentimes they'll be like, oh, we need SLOs, and those SLOs are not going to tell us anything about what we need. Because I'm going to do an SLO on my CPU. It's like, okay. Great, I'm glad you're thinking that way. But let's see what you're trying to do. Yeah. And then the other thing that I really,

this also strikes me, is you said, you really need, after understanding the business, you need to define the target groups. And here, people often have a certain vision about what the target group is. Like in our case, and Brian, I come back to when we, for instance, sell to, let's say,

SREs. But SRE is a very broad thing. But an SRE has certain needs, certain pains. SREs are often former performance engineers. They have a different background and so I think we need to figure out what type of what what type of smaller groups they are and like where do they come from and then figure out what is the real pain and how can we solve that pain and then get them to what we have to offer um they're not in your world, when you get called in, I assume the product that this company has to sell is kind of well-defined.

Or do you sometimes also have, have you been into situations where as you're working with that customer and trying to find the target persona, you actually figure out that there needs to be a change in product too, to actually then sell to a certain market? Or is it typically always like the product is obviously clearly like think about and not just making something up a car company they sell a car right but maybe then in your work with them you figure out hey the car that you sell nobody needs you actually would need to build a different car depends and it's different from customer to customer. Yes. Because one example is a more traditional company producing food is like they're doing this for 140 years now so hey we're doing this so what but if you're producing sausages and meat you have to reflect the changes the modern times bring to us. So and this is one of our jobs to help our customers to

redefine their perspectives of themselves. Because there are many times they are thinking from the inner to the outer space. So we are like this, so we have to send this message like we are. We are the world's best producers of sausages. So the people out there, younger people, don't know them. For them it's, they don't have interest in them because they are doing sausages for 140 years. Perhaps they are not interested in eating a lot of meat now.

So we help the customer to show them how they are viewed from the outside. How their potential customer, what is the potential look of their customer. And developing their new perspective, new sights, new ideas of what you can communicate. So it's not about doing sausages for 140 years, but it's about doing sausages with a high level quality, being aware of what this means, all regional and so on. These are the topics which are interesting for the potential customers. And so we are the partner of our customers to develop their sides of their own services, perhaps. And other example could be, let me think, was like... It's hard to explain this, so we'll skip this. It's okay, but I think I liked that example a lot.

And my question is, and the reason why I asked this question, and I was hoping you have exactly those conversations, that I think we, from a software engineering perspective, from software industry, before we build something, because we think we solve a certain problem for a certain target audience, we should actually learn from you on how you approach in digital marketing campaigns, because the first thing you want to understand is who is your potential

addressable market? What is their pain and how can we solve their pain? And then let's build or refine that product idea that we had so that we can really sell to that market. And especially if we are, you know, if we are a lot of us in the industry, and that's not only for our company, but most companies, most are very engineering driven, like building products with a very engineering focus. And sometimes you forget that you're building products that are not just for engineers,

but they should actually have a bigger usage in the future other other target uh users but we don't know them and we never think about that you know they maybe the modern sre that did not go uh through a 10 year like i don't know they didn't go to university where he studied and then had 20 years experience but maybe this the new sre you know had a different profession and because of COVID, they got re-educated. They only have six months of training. And now they have to fulfill the role of an SRE, but it's a completely different SRE than the one that has been doing IT systems engineering for the last 20 years. Yes. And I think that's a big lesson learned. And this is also why a lot of the things that you said in the podcast and now, it just resonates so well.

Because I want to make sure our listeners understand if you're developing products, if you're building features, don't just think you know what problem you solve for a particular persona. Because that persona might not be the persona that you think it is. Yeah. One of the additional complications is that the intended user might not be the purchaser. If you think about a toy, especially around this time of year, the kid's going to want it, but the parent's going to be making the decision. If it's software, maybe you have engineers who are going to use it, but an executive who's going to be signing the check,

and they're going to have to have a thing. For the sausage maker, it's, well, I don't know who's going to be signing the check and they're going to have to have a thing for the sausage maker right it's well i don't know who's going to be that's a lot more aligned with who's buying versus using but maybe if it is a health conscious parent buying sausages for their kid but they see you know oh locally sourced blah blah i'll i'll get this one instead so when you're working on those products it's good to know, you know, maybe the people creating them, certain levels of people don't necessarily fully have to understand. But the company as a whole has to understand as it's going through product development features and then marketing especially. And I think that the challenge is way too often it's driven by the current perceptions of what the company is and has to offer. And as you said, you're not looking at it from the outside.

You're not looking at what people are interested in. Or maybe if you have engineers, engineering-minded marketing people, they're going to miss that side. Or people who only live in the sausage world, right? That's an amazing world, but they only live in the sausage world, right? That's an amazing world, but if they only live in the sausage world, right? You're not thinking of all the other foods and other options out there. So it's that context. It always goes back to those why questions, and why, and why, and why, and who, and what.

Anyway, you were going to say something there too, Richard. I didn't want to hope you didn't lose that thought. Maybe you did, though. No, it's exactly what you mentioned about. Another example was to solve a communication problem for

a bank here in Austria. They want to, there's a part of the bank dealing with the youth, so they have the young potential customers make the bank attractive for them. So one of the approaches is to do financial're not schooling education that one approach is financial education because many young people are not aware of uh basic principles uh worth of the money how to

gain money how to spend money the methods behind this or this digital money what is crypto you name it but also that someone has to work for it and what happens with money at the bank and so on the easy way is we have to educate the young people. But you have many other target groups which can help you and you have to understand this because there are the parents. Many parents do not have enough education to explain this to their children. You have the teachers who have to represent this stuff, these topics during the school. And you have the employees at the bank who have to explain this to their customers.

And these four target groups on the same topic don't have a total different view on this now so for example the employee in the bank has to think about okay I have a lot of tasks to do and financial education is one of them I don't know how to do this I have don't have time it sounds complicated I don't want to stand in front of the children with 15 years old laughing at me while i'm doing financial education and this is a perspective totally different from the youngest one sitting in a class or on the smartphone or watching whatever they're watching. So you have total different approaches to reach them, to get in contact with them, to make them interact with your tools, with your information.

And this only can work out if you understand perfectly how they are thinking, what they need. You use, say, where is the pain, and to present a solution for this point. And that's a basic principle in online marketing because for example if you do such engine optimization it's not about many many head of you name it are thinking about we I want that my company is being found for this verse I don't care what do you think what words this is. We do research. We have a look at the market there what such words, what keywords

are used and then we do a SEO to make to push your ranking to push the performance of your website and that's always about having a look at what is going out there and having a look what the target groups thinking what they need what they don't even know that they

need but you have to know it I think that's a great example actually with the seo where you think hey because we are all living in bubbles right and if i might be the head of xyc and the seo the head of seo and in a certain company and i live in my bubble then i probably know my bubble and then i optimize my stuff for my bubble but I miss the whole cloud out there and I think that's where the outside perspective helps a lot now my question to you is how often do you then get pushback or feel resistance because they say but I'm in the business for 100 years you have no clue about my business why do you tell me how what i need to change do you sometimes get resistance like this yes yes of course but um there are for us two solutions um number one

after workshop they have a deep understanding of our profession we work on together. Solution number two, they are not our customer. You cannot perform as a branding agency if you don't have the respect of your customer. It's all about, I don't know how to say in English, in German it's on the same eye level. So it's not we are delivering like a slave because you said us you have to deliver. But it's about putting the professional skills of both together and make out the best of this. And the solutions we use, if there is resistance, is in the digital world very simple. We do a quick research and we show numbers.

And this is what counts. If somebody doesn't have a look at the numbers and is doing business,'s i don't think he will be doing business long that's the point so for example the ceo is very easy to having as a quick research on the search market on the trends and you see within a little time where you can position for some topics where is perhaps a niche where nobody is searching but you can capture this for you in a half a year something like that and where are chances and where it's don't forget it don't use this it's for example in the tourism world search keywords like holiday i imagine it can be forget it tough as well because you have people who think they're either their company or their product or visionary

or they're unique in the market yet you're coming back and saying but people aren't going to understand that so if we take that vision you have and convert it to what's being looked for in the market, a little of that will come through, but it's not going to be that visionary statement you have because if you want to capture people's attention, it's got to be what they know, what they're looking for. And then once they get in and see what you have to offer,

that's when they'll start understanding. And I would imagine that can be hard for people to take. Because everyone thinks their baby is the most amazing looking baby. And you have to say, well, you have a thousand people out there, or billions of people looking at thousands of babies. You've got to put the cute little hat on it to make it look like the cute baby that everyone else has. Is that, I guess that's sort of along the lines of what Andy's talking to. So if you're not, I guess in English it's on the same level, but eye level, they're

very similar concept. I imagine that's within that same realm. But yeah, I guess where I'm going is I'm curious to hear if there are, I know you can't go into specifics, but are there any instances where you really had to challenge somebody on that and how did they, you know, did they come along and say like, yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it, you know,

and move on and then have success i mean i don't know if there's a specific story you can go into that or not but that's i guess where i'm going our company is based on three important principles this one is branding design and understand well how brands do function and third is the digital part yeah and with digital we think all about all the marketing websites content and so on so And this is like a very 360 approach as a service to our customers. And many times we enter in a customer relationship with only a small part. One of them for example was like it's now I think six seven years ago a traditional company here in Tyrol and they thought yes we have to do something

on social media but we don't know how and in fact we don't want but we think we have to so who can who can lend us a hand and give us a direction and let's talk about it no not saying we do it but let's talk about it so so we gave them a clear view on how they can perform on social media. It was in fact about Facebook, Instagram, in terms of what are the target groups, what do they need, what do they want to learn or receive from you as a company and so on? And what is your image now and where do you want to move on and so on? And so we started with this small part of social media strategy, no concept. Let's call it a concept because this was not a strategy.

And we built up, they learned that we know what we are doing because the channels were performing. They got the talk back from the customers and from the families. Oh, you're now on Facebook. Yeah. And so they got into this and okay that's it feels well and we see on the numbers we see performance so let's go further and we over the years we did the website from the base on and the last years we reinvented their brand because there was a traditional company and had a brand and a logo really old style, from the 70s.

They lived in the world like, everybody knows us for looking like this, we can't change this. Because we lose something. And we developed together a brand new brand, which is modern, softly shifted in colors, cleaner and so on. And now they are positioned with a new claim, with a new image, with a new perspective for the future without losing their past. And that was all about this time together and getting this searching for the word. Right. It was all about trusting us. And trust is a main principle in active and in a good client relationship.

And building trust is all about having respect on the profession and the knowledge of the other. And looking forward to put this together to a new solution. You know, Andy, the parallels between that type of story and the DevOps or cloud migration, building small, seeing results, getting buy-in, and then trusting the new. Besides the parallels you were talking about earlier in the show it's just amazing how once again we see parallels between different industries that with the it world being much younger than all these other traditional industries it's still all the same patterns still the same parallels and it's the same world everywhere you also

also Brian you always bring up the you know the Microsoft from your there's a different Microsoft and we have today things like this it's really it's really fast I think sometimes people or organization this case right they have to reinvent themselves a little bit whether it's just because as you said, the demography changes or the customer changes because people, maybe the traditional

customer base is no longer there. If you're really around for 140 years, I guess the first customer isn't longer walking among us. Unless there's a vampire. Who knows? Who knows? first customer no longer isn't longer walking among us unless it was a vampire unless who knows who knows now but i wanted to say one more thing on the um on the discussion we had earlier because yes i wanted to say you need to know what your what your customers want so you can build a

product that they need on the other side if we would only follow this particular pattern then we would only build what people think they want and need and never be really revolutionary innovative and i'm just quoting i think it was henry ford right because he always his claim to fame his quote was if i would have listened to our customers i would have built a faster horse but not a car so i think sometimes it has to it you need to still have you know make a bold move and say i'm introducing the world to something they don't know that they need yet like we didn't know we need the iphone but but if you think in terms of needs, I need to travel from point A to E.

And if I'm there faster, I have an advantage. That's the need. So it's not marketing something new, but marketing the innovation in what you know or what you're familiar with. And that's exactly that whole, I can get there faster. I was using that example with someone else because they were like, we walk 20 miles to work. And that's what we've done. We know it's a terrible thing to do. Okay, we're going to sell you a car

and you can buy this car. Great, I bought the car, but I'm still walking 20 miles to work. Well, yes, you need to learn to drive the car. Well, I don't have time to do that. But you have the car. You can get there so much better. Take a few minutes to learn to drive that car

and you don't have to walk 20 miles to work anymore. It's fantastic, right? Just do it. And there's these parallels with, you know, how do you make the innovative familiar so that your customers aren't confused? And I think that's where all that marketing stuff comes in. Hey, Bernard, I have one more topic

because I know we have already kind of, it's amazing, 40 minutes passed. But one of the things that you brought up in the German podcast I listened to, which for me was really interesting because it also came up recently. You mentioned there's different channels that people use where we can reach people. You talked about Google. You talked about Twitter, the metaverse, like everything around Facebook and Instagram. We have LinkedIn, we have TikTok. And one of the things that I thought was interesting, and I want to just highlight this because you said obviously, people are for different reasons and in different times during their life on different platforms.

You are on LinkedIn because you are seeking for business opportunity. You're making business connection and you're doing it is probably between your business hours. In the evening, you are our generations on Facebook, the next generation is on Instagram, and the latest generation is on TikTok. And you are in a completely different state of mind when you consume that content on this platform and therefore you also need to create completely different content

and to attract the same people which i thought was really interesting i never thought about that because i thought yeah just creating the same content but that doesn't matter where i posted because yeah but it does matter because a different state of mind different demography that's a very interesting because it's one topic which our customers are thinking about oh okay it sounds like it's more work and i have to spend more money on this. Yes, but you have to because you bring it back. And that's the fun thing on online marketing and measuring because you can show the numbers. For example, LinkedIn is a channel we use, but not generally. So there are cases we use it a lot because

linkedin is a expensive channel for doing marketing but if you reach out for the right people to return on invest it's okay yeah and you can work with it and you make business with it. With other goals like awareness and something else it's not the right channel and we don't spend money on LinkedIn for general topics because it's too expensive. So this is the other part. We can measure how specific content performs on specific channels. That's also the main work during an online marketing campaign running, having a look on what topic with target group A, B or C on which channel is performing best, which topics are not performing, which ad sets are performing better things which work.

And on the other hand, it's always a little exploration of the market because you learn a lot out there when you take a look on the numbers, how ad sets perform. And if you see, okay, this trying, do this or have a look at this, works better than the very complicated product explanation which the customer prefers. And having a look at the numbers and for this make the decisions which channel works best with content works best. You know, I'm thinking of the business model from earlier, whereas sausage advertising on LinkedIn wouldn't do too much, but a viral dance featuring a sausage on TikTok, that's going to be cool. I've been imagining the sausage dancing.

I've got pictures in my head now. Hopefully I get out of it. Right. So if anybody knows anyone in the sausage industry, viral sausage TikTok dances I think need to become a thing. But I think it's a great point, right? Because what would they do on LinkedIn? Dude, it's mostly worker people or like you're getting towards execs.

What are you going to do? A history of your company? What that gonna do you know you need you need the kids to be like sausage funny and it's so funny that at this part on a conversation it seems so totally clear yeah but the same people in a workshop we have to convince for one an hour why this works better or this works worse. But that's the main thing we have to solve during this period of work here, to gain the trust that they understand,

okay, these guys know what they're doing, so let's go further. I have an idea. We should record a podcast about that topic so you can then send the podcast to all the people and save yourself an hour and a half, and in the end, just take the paycheck. And then we'll do a viral podcast dance. I think the point you make there is really good because we see this all the time.

And I see this even if I have sales engineers, solution engineers who work for me. And every once in a while, I'll get on and just shadow one of their calls. And because I'm not leading the call, I can sit back and clearly think and clearly identify what's going on. Whereas if I'm leading the call, I'm in the hot seat. Same thing with the companies. They're running the business day to day to day. By bringing in an outside or a third party who doesn't have to focus on the business, who can take a step back, look at that vision, and then reflect it back to them. That is very often the only way they're going to get the clarity to see that, because when you're in it, you don't have that luxury.

And you're trying to see, if you're a fish in the water, you're trying to see the mountaintop, but you're in the water. You're not going to be able to see that. I often call this a catalytic process. It's not putting something new into the conversation or into the solution, but reflecting it with other perspective and the associations you have in mind after that, often leads to other views and to other state of minds. Yeah, really. I need to figure out how I can also take this,

what I've just learned and kind of, because basically what, Brian, you brought the example of the SE call. That's awesome, right? And then Bernhard, you said the, after one and a half hours, people all of a sudden, even though it's nothing new, they should have understood this from the beginning that TikTok is a different audience. But still, you need to sit in a room and discuss it through. And I also feel like I have a lot of the same conversations all over again. Like you sit in your workshop and explain the same things

about slos and and then after an hour all of a sudden i leave the room with a group of people that now understand better what this is all about even though it should have been clear for them in the beginning but sometimes it takes somebody else that explains it to them yeah it's a great way of putting it. Cool. I took a couple more notes from the podcast that you initially did. But I just want to point it out here because I want to encourage people to just consume more of the content that you already put out there, even though I assume most of it is probably in German, Bernhard. Yes. But I took a couple of things. Defining clear goals and target groups is obviously always very important.

I also liked one thing that you said in the very end. It says you have to change your mindset and going from campaign thinking to funnel thinking. You mentioned this earlier. You need to think about an end-to-end user journey as a funnel. And then you can do targeted campaigns depending on where people are on the funnel, depending on do they know you already or not? And where are they? How many touch points did you have? And then coming back to the,

also the title of your podcast that you did, build, measure, and learn, start experimenting. And people sometimes freak out when you say experimenting because that sometimes means, hey, you have no clue what you're doing, doing right and sometimes you don't know what you're doing because you just get to learn about what impact does it have what you do yeah and then it just yeah yes yes but it's uh one of the things i like most uh on my job you learn every day and you have you have to experience on principle mechanisms of your work but you learn every day about new businesses

about new target groups about how companies work in their inner. And I love it because it's very interesting and normally we find solutions for everyone. Yeah, and I love it that you took the challenge today to come on our podcast. And I know maybe seemingly Brian and I are in a completely different field and have different backgrounds and maybe different thoughts about this. But for me, this was usually educational and a lot of lessons learned that I think I can apply in my future conversations I have with the people that I interact with. And that's why I want to thank you, Bernhard.

It was a pleasure and thank you for asking me out for this. Because from the other side, this Pure Performance podcast is high-level stuff. And well, I don't understand all of the

episodes, but... I don't either. But I love the way you do this, guys, and hope to hear the next episode. Yeah, and I just want to really say thank you, Bernard, and thank you, Andy, for bringing them on. You know, sometimes every once in a while we take that risk of, okay, this one's a little bit outside the norm. But as we see here, even though it's different worlds, it's concepts that work in all of them. And it's great to hear these lessons, these approaches, these techniques that apply to more of a marketing thing, but being able to translate

them from our point of view to the technical side, because it's the same thing as I said before, the parallel industries. And that's also, I think, one of the things Andy and I, you said you love about your job, you're learning all the time. That's what we love about doing this podcast, is we're learning from sometimes deeply technical people, sometimes things out of a little bit more left field such as this. So it's always fascinating when we get this opportunity. So thank you for doing this, for helping educate us and for hopefully helping our listeners gain a new perspective as well. Getting a perspective from outside the bubble. That's what it's about.

Yes, exactly. Perfect. I loved it. All right. Well, thank you again. Thanks for all of our listeners. And we hope you all have enjoyable holidays. Oh, Festivus.

I forgot to mention Festivus. Happy Festivus. All the Americans, that's from Seinfeld. Yeah, you know that. So happy Festivus, everybody the Americans, that's from Seinfeld. Yeah, you know that. So happy Festivus, everybody. Go air your grievances. Thanks,

everyone. We will see you next year. Well, we won't see you, but you'll hear us next year. And Andy, thanks for a fantastic year of your performance. And Richard, I guess this will probably be the last one for the year. I think it's airing

December 19th if I'm not mistaken. So Bernard, thank you for wrapping up a great year for us. And thanks for everyone for listening.

Appreciate you all. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.