I would say profit marketing is all about starting to understand your assortment, what part of your assortment is working and where you make your money.
MEDIA 7: So, let's just begin with how it is to work with top performers from Google, focusing mostly on online marketing. Could you please tell us a little bit about the experience?
JONAS HAGSTRÖMER THEODORSSON: I love working with extraordinary people. Daniel and Morten who founded Keywordio was really that kind of people: very ambitious, always learning and trying to do better in every aspect of their lives and at the same time having fun. So, finding people who are extraordinary in their talents; who are very humble; very curious, and open to learning - those are the three things that we always make sure of when we find talent for our teams all over the world.
M7: How do you help businesses accelerate their performance marketing on Google Ads, Google Shopping, Facebook, and Instagram?
JHT: So, I meet about 2-3 founders of e-commerce companies in India every day. And what is interesting is that I see a clear pattern that many companies face the same challenge. You have started an online business; you have started to sell and some of the online marketplaces- could be Amazon, Flipkart, etc. - and then you realize that you need to buy the customer every time to make a sale. And then you realize that there's not much profit left for you. So, what do you do then? Then, you basically start a webshop of your own, trying to get people to come in. And then of course, how do you do that efficiently? Well, you start running GoogleAds, you start running Facebook, you start looking at YouTube for other channels. And I see a lot of people do not look at the assortment of their product marketing at the beginning and they often don't know how much to spend on marketing to acquire a customer. So we help the customer understand the profitable level to run a business. And when we do that, we end up finding a lot of new insights that we then use to run Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram for them in the best possible way.
So let's say you're selling sneakers. Now, it might be too expensive to run Google Ads in Mumbai for sneakers, for example. You may not be profiting from the clicks because it could be that the cost per click is very high in Mumbai. It might be that you actually need to kill that path and make that ad run somewhere else, where you can get the customer in and still be profitable. Of course, you can be a company that has venture capital and you have a lot of cash in the bank, but still, I think running a healthy business where you are profitable and can scale the profit is really essential. And for that, you need to combine Facebook, Instagram, with state-of-the-art Google Ads, and that is what we are solving for the customer.
I see a lot of people do not look at the assortment of their product marketing at the beginning and they often don't know how much to spend on marketing to acquire a customer.
M7: Let’s talk about you your speech at the Global Digital Marketing Summit Edition for this year where you spoke extensively about profit marketing. Could you please tell us a little bit about it; what is profit marketing and how it is beneficial for us at the moment?
JHT: I would say profit marketing is all about starting to understand your assortment, what part of your assortment is working and where you make your money. And then connect that to your marketing effort, which is profit, and marketing. It sounds simple, but it's really hard to do. And what I see is, that many times you have this disconnect between the marketing teams and their understanding of profits. So the marketing team just says, "Okay, we can spend this amount of money for Google Ads." This disconnect between this basic understanding and marketing scheme is quite common and it must be worked on together. It is also important that the founder and the CEO or the CMO or even the Board needs to understand how to efficiently run a profit marketing business today.
M7: Keywordio has a free online course about profit marketing. What does it provide for our readers?
JHT: This is something we like to share, and that's why we put it out as a free online course. It's a 45-minute video. There's also a tool in Google Sheet where you can play around with your own numbers yourself and find out what should my returns on ads really be. All of this is free. It takes your requirements into account and I promise you, you will be better off when you've taken this course and you've started to play around with this Google Sheet yourself. So, invest one hour in the course and then invest one more hour of work to think about it and I promise that you will be smarter with how you spend your marketing money afterwards.
I can promise you that there will be a much larger amount of people using the internet to buy things online in the future.
M7: Speaking of events, Keywordio is also hosting an event this October, "How to Combine Organic and Paid in TikTok for your E-commerce". Will you be speaking at the event?
JHT: Yes, I am going to be a part of the event. Unfortunately for our customers from India, TikTok is not allowed. I think India’s just such an interesting market. Because if you look today, around 45% of the population is using the internet. The proportion is extremely low compared to other parts of the world. So, the potential for the growth of e-commerce in India is just enormous.I can promise you that there will be a much larger amount of people using the internet to buy things online in the future. But no matter what the marketing channel, be it Snapchat, TikTok or some other social media app, it's always quite cheap in the beginning because it’s largely a bidding platform to serve ads. Say, for example, you run a Google Ads for white sneakers and there's an auction going on behind every Google query. But if there's only one bidding, it’s not gonna be much of an auction. The price will be quite low, right? Today, there is high competition and there's a lot of people bidding on Google search queries and that makes the price go up. So when TikTok is launched in countries, the price is set very low, which is why it is very cheap in the beginning. That is what we are going to talk about in the upcoming event.
M7: Speaking about the internet market, what are the best ways to boost your business visibility online?
JHT: It's always good if you can figure out the two different types of e-commerce groups. There are direct consumers. For example, you have your own sneakers that you are designing, producing, and then selling - it's your own brand. And then you have other online stores where you are selling other companies' products. So for the one-brand stores, it's often about building their brand, getting people to know you. And if you only have one sneaker, then you need to look at performance marketing in a certain way. And if you're working with a single brand, then, typically you use Facebook or Instagram more and focus on building the customer journey with awareness ads. But if you have a multiple-brand store and selling maybe hundreds of different sneakers, then you should start at a different point in the customer journey. Then you have to look into how many people are looking to buy, for example, green sneakers, size 43, online today in Mumbai. Because if you target your marketing there, you will have better returns on investment. And then you can build more brand awareness long-term. That's probably the most efficient way. So it’s most important to understand what kind of business you have, and the point of the customer journey to start your marketing from.
M7: That's some really good advice. There's always so much changing around the world that is always changing. What do you read to stay on top of your game at all times?
JHT: I like slow reading. What I mean by that is, when I buy a book, I always read the transcripts of the book before and when I read it, I always take notes simultaneously. And then I try to collect the most important things from these books. So, I don't try to speed-read or read a certain number of books. I have a long reading list. But, I only try to focus on the important things in these books. I love reading about human psychology and behavior in terms of how to actually design a product that people will love and will keep coming back for. The last book I read was The Hook by Nir Eyal and it’s actually about how you create and market products that people are gonna keep coming back for every day. So, I read the summary of the book for 10 minutes, then read the book and take a lot of notes, and then I reflect on it. So that's how I always read. And that's how I learn.