Show notes
In this episode, I have a special guest: Or Hadar, Professional lead at monday.com, who manages all the online brand campaigns. In this special episode, we talked about why online campaigns should be an integral part of your marketing strategy whether you are a startup or a Fortune 500 company, where to start, and how latest technology innovations changed the game.
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This episode only represents Fabien’s own opinion and personal thoughts.
Transcript
00:03
Welcome to the Brand Runner podcast, where we discuss marketing trends and tech. I’m your host Fabien. Let’s get started. Today, we have a very special guest on the show, Hors Hadar. He is the professional team lead for all the online campaigns for the Brand Awareness’s team at monday.com. Working with him on multiple international campaigns, I learned so much. I am so excited to have him on the show. Hey Fabien, thank you very much for having me today. We worked on so many markets and campaigns together.
00:33
from the US market to Japan and everything in between. I always learn a lot. But today, as I would love to cover it all, also for the more entrepreneurs and the start-upers part of our listeners, I will start with the basics. Maybe you can tell us, as simple as it may sound, what is an online campaign. So there are a few pillars for online campaigns, but in that case, we will talk about brand awareness campaigns.
00:57
We’ll start with the basics once you talk about the international activities that we are running. So just the background for those who are less familiar. Here at the Brando 1S team on Monday, we’re running a lot of out of home activities. Out of home is offline marketing, including billboards, subways, bus covers, etc. In different main cities around the world by our focus markets.
01:25
And for any of these campaigns we try to add also online activities around it. We want to echo the messaging, we want people to feel us all around. So we will make it on the social networks, if it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn for example, they will see us online on different websites. I’m going to put display banners or motions. Sometimes different social networks that are dedicated for each market, like LINE in Japan, which is a big thing.
01:54
And this is what we refer to as online brand campaigns. In that term, the main goal is to emphasize the main message that we have on the out of home activities. So it will be the same visual. They will have the ad recall when they see it. They will have a click option. Okay, when they see it on the streets, they don’t have any way to actually come to the Monday if they won’t look for it, which sometimes is a big ask for them to do. And once they see us online, it’s just to click on it and see what is it about.
02:24
And so we give them the option to get to Monday easily. How does it sit within a marketing strategy? Why do it in the first place? And why do you think it’s important? Yeah. It’s a good question. We’re always learning. We did a lot of testing to see what is the right approach for us. We are still learning. We might change things along the way after this chapter will be recorded. But yeah, at the beginning we did some activities that were
02:52
only offline, sometimes it was only online. And then we started to test it together, the combination. I will say that we are also dividing the time that each part of the campaign is going live, so we can actually see the value it provides. So in many cases, we start with the offline activities and then we see the online, and we can see the multiple, it adds to the overall performance of the campaign. Actually, we just started now a different test in Japan where we did the online.
03:20
previous to the offline and we also saw amazing results coming from this approach. And we see that 1 plus 1 equals 3 in that case. As long as you emphasize the same messaging, staying on the same line of messaging, we see it really supporting each other. We understand that if you add another element, another place that the user will feel you, you will understand that you are stronger or bigger brand. You talk a lot about the correlation between offline and online.
03:50
But if we take, for instance, the scenario of like a startup who’s not really ready yet for like the whole offline thing and out of home and wants to start online, can you maybe talk about online brand campaign in that context? Yeah, it’s a big question. I think once you talk about online brand, you need to start talking about brand because brand is consistency. You need to understand what you want to say. You want to understand how you want to look online.
04:19
like what is your visual language, what are the colors that are relevant to you, what is the font you are using, I see a lot of brands that are starting and they are every ad looks completely different, even the logo might look different. The first steps are consistency, you need to understand how you keep knocking on the same area. And I have a point of view that says you need to start, look at it as circles, you need to start from the very small circle and start to expand it. So let’s say
04:50
Who is your target audience? Where they are? What channels are they using? What is the core areas? Like what kind of topics they will read about or see videos on YouTube about? And you need to start by using those channels or those areas until you will start to see the signals of what kind of messaging brings more traffic or more engagement. And then you can start to double down on this area and start building your actual…
05:18
messaging strategy and what visuals are working or not working to you. If you will see the early days of Monday, you will see banners that have lions on them. Manage like a lion. And that was one of the messaging that we used back then. And we understand that we need offices to be part of the visuals. We need it to be work related. We need to talk to managers and not just to employees.
05:46
We learned a lot of things along the way from different tests that we did and mistakes. And it takes time and it’s okay, it’s part of the drill. You just need to start with something the smallest that you can and from there try to keep expanding it. We didn’t start out of home the first day, we started it only four or five years after we really build the structures. And yeah, we keep expanding.
06:10
It sounds like what you’re talking about is a discussion we’ll often have internally, which is all comes back to brand building and brand identity and what the brand means, what the brand mission is and the values. And then you can build that creatively, which leads me to my next question, which is, if you think about start-up brands again and entrepreneurs that are building their own brands, if they have to focus on like, let’s say four pillars in order to reach that and start to build a brand online, what would be the steps?
06:40
I think first of all you need to start with fast execution that are not high budget to learn the surface. It costs you money to really learn and adapt and you need to do it fast. You need to make methodology that helps you learn also from mistakes. I think the best lessons we learn are from mistakes and mistakes cost money.
07:06
You want it to be the lowest amount possible in order to be as most effective as you can. But I think you need to start jump to the water. The easiest execution is to start with banners, to see what kind of messaging is working for you and anyone can build a simple banner, you don’t really need a professional designer for that. And from those banners you start understanding what kind of messaging…
07:32
makes people more interested in what you have to offer and that can lead you to start making things that are more produced in a way let’s say YouTube videos YouTube videos doesn’t have to be that expensive you can do motion videos if you have motion artists working with you I think our first videos each one of them cost us less than 100 US dollars even 70 US dollars, a great one that
08:00
won the second place in Google during, I think it was 2018, as the best video for action campaign that we did. Because it was a great one that we did in-house with our people, and it cost us around 70 US dollars to produce it. And we learned a lot out of it, and it helped us scale and it helped us test different technical approaches on the marketing side as well.
08:26
And yeah, it doesn’t have to be expensive. You don’t need to jump too high. You don’t need to run away. You need to start with the small things to learn from them, to see what visuals work for you, what messaging working for you, which channels are the right ones for you to set up your technical stack from behind the scene, which is also important as well. And it takes time. It’s a process of test, fail, learn, repeat.
08:53
until you find the right areas you want to keep pushing. You talk a little bit about budget, and it’s always a challenge for a company who’s just starting online, especially for company efforts. And of course, it’s very particular for each company, but how do you think new businesses or startup wanting to invest in online effort can decide on how much to invest and plan for it? There’s little we can do with little amount of money, but in that term, it keeps you focused because…
09:21
You know you don’t have enough, you don’t have a lot, it’s more accurate to say. So let’s focus on the things that really make the impact. If we talk about marketing, we can talk about push channels versus pull channels. Pull channels is places where users are looking actively for something, they have high intent. Let’s say Google search. And if you are there, you’re answering to their problem or to their question.
09:48
and it’s a better value for money in that term. It can push you until a specific point because you don’t build brand recognition, you are not bringing new and relevant traffic, you’re just working with people that are kind of deeply in market right now. While on push channels, you are building awareness, you’re building the need for customers, especially if you’re entering a new market or a new category.
10:15
And on the long term you can’t work without it. You have to have your push side strong and your pull side stronger. So that regarding on where to invest if you are starting, we’ll go at the beginning mainly to pull areas. The push can support as remarketing approach. After users enter your website, they show kind of intent. They might look to your feature page or your pricing page.
10:42
they didn’t make the action so you can send them to retargeting audiences and try to meet them on Facebook or Google Display Network or wherever you want. But you need to build yourself real estate in a way or assets that can serve you in the long run and not just one time. Always think about scale, think about what will happen in one year or two years and not what is happening right now.
11:09
and that will not push you to the next level never. Regarding the first step, how much budget you need to allocate, I think it’s a big question that is very different to each company or each company type. It depends on the lifetime value that you provide from each of your clients, it depends on the conversions that you have along the way of your funnels, if it’s a no-touch funnel, PLG that is more familiar today or…
11:37
It’s something that is a long sales cycle. And so it’s, it’s very changing. It’s also dependent on the type of product or things that you are selling. So it’s, it’s very different. And it’s, it’s a big question and each company needs to do its own analysis and understand what is the right methodology, how much money you can invest. The best thing that you can take out of it is to be on top of the numbers, like to really monitor it.
12:06
to see the cohort, you can see it on a monthly basis, a cohort that started in January 23. What is happening to it along the way every month, if it’s going up on the ARR or revenues that you’re providing from it or going down. And in that way, you can understand if what you’re doing is helping the business to grow and you can invest more money or if it’s not. Again, it depends on the model. If you have recording revenue, it helped to grow along the way.
12:35
So it’s very depending on the company. So you do a lot of campaigns internationally. Can you talk a little bit about the difference in particular markets? Like we’ve done things for Korea or Japan or Germany. What is the difference here? So yeah, each region is completely different. I think we got to a stage that we understand that we need to adapt more for each of those markets. Part of the mistakes we did along the way is to say, okay, if we are taking the campaigns that worked for us in the US, for example, and we translate it.
13:05
to Japanese and run it in Japan, it will work. No, and the answer is no, and it completely failed. And what we learned is that we need to really localize, and sometimes even hyper-localize where relevant, to meet the audience, okay? And it starts from, it’s the ABC of marketing at the end, that you need to do a deep research of who’s your audience, where they are, how they behave, how they consume products similar to yourself.
13:33
Let’s say it’s very known for companies in the US that anyone has his credit card or his company credit card and he can start using Monday, sign up by himself, bring it to the company, put his credit card and start becoming a paying account. While in Japan it’s not that familiar. So we needed to do a lot of adaptations.
13:55
It started from learning the platforms they’re using and one of the biggest platforms they have is Line. It’s something we were not aware of before. It’s kind of a social network that have everything inside it including chats, including news, including everything. So we partnered with Line. It was not that easy. We went through a lot of different options until we find a partner that was able to buy media for us because they were not approving our…
14:23
Israeli credit card they needed Japanese localized account and yeah, it was one of the channels that we used We also changed the flow that we are sending the users. They are not going directly to a sign up flow They’re going to kind of more lead nurturing flow Because this is more familiar there and we see good signals coming from that flow as well And so this is about different channels or different funnels the messaging and the creative
14:49
You are the master in this room right now, so you can talk more from me about it, but We needed to adapt it. You needed to be more localized more animated If you guys the listeners want you can check us later and see how it looks like in japan fabian will share a link maybe And but it looks very different than the usual things that we do And people here at monday, they might look weird when they see it and but
15:19
It seems like it’s working for the Japanese market based on the signals we’re seeing from this campaign. And it was a lot of work that the amazing creative team and designers that we have in there together in the brand awareness team did in order to meet the local audience. So there’s a lot of adaptations and it’s starting from a deep research that each one of the team needed to do in his area and how we amplify it on the campaign itself.
15:47
Yeah, I think from a creative standpoint, the first question is how much this local market know about you. Does it know you at all? We call it the new markets versus the mature markets. And that kind of defines how much you want to go down the funnel for the messaging. So that’s the first thing. And then the other thing, how do you tie in with the local culture and create an emotional bond, right? Because that’s what brand awareness is at the end. It’s like how you create an emotional bond between the brand and the potential client or customer. For sure.
16:16
Next question is how has recent technology innovations changed the way you work? It’s interesting. We are trying always to keep up with the trends. It’s a general approach here at Mande. Let’s say five, six years ago when we built our YouTube channel and started on YouTube, we were one of the first B2B marketers to use this platform for marketing. Today if you go to YouTube you will see many of them.
16:43
So we always try to look at the trends, where the users are, how they consume their content. We are trying to send surveys every once a while to better understand where they are, what social platforms they’re using, where they spend their leisure time as well, not only their work time. And we see a lot of different channels rising up along the way. And that if we look at traditional marketing, or let’s say if we jump in to the history 20 years ago,
17:12
You will see the big brands are using radio and they’re using TV. And so the new age media is CTV, connected TV, the digital side of the television and audio streaming like Spotify, Pandora, podcasts that we are using right now, which is it’s different way for users to consume their content. And so we are always trying to be on top of the trends and to understand where
17:41
the industry is going and try to be there as soon as possible in order to lead in that field. And let’s say today we are very invested in the CTV front, the connected television, platforms like Hulu, Paramount, Peacock, it’s platforms that the users can watch videos for leisure time. It can be series, it can be news, it can be a lot of different things.
18:07
And every once in a while there’s a ads break and we are there with the 30 second video ad that we are creating. Again, Fabian that sits in front of me is the amazing producer who’s doing this amazing work. And then the upside of it is that we are able to track how it performs. We are able also in some way to target more relevant audience. But again, we are doing our research and we understand that
18:36
the customers that are using Connected TV are more techy, for example, and those are people that we want to talk with. So those are the platforms that they are using. This is right for us, it’s Monday. It might not be the best solution for each company. And yeah, this is just an example how we are trying always to be upfront and to find the trends. We see how much more people are watching it every year.
19:02
We see how much more money is invested in the ads industry around it, and we want to be there. We want to be there as soon as possible. What are the challenges you face now? I think the main challenge is around the tracking. There’s a lot of changes around the user’s privacy across all the boards, and also on our end, that we can share a lot of data with the, with different vendors we are using. And it’s arming our possibility to be as effective as we were.
19:32
We are trying to do the best in order to learn out of it. We’re doing different tests along the way to see the real impact. We are adding more clickable or scannable assets that we can see that users are actually reacting to our ads and not just seeing them and enjoying. I think this is the main challenge the entire industry is having. It’s not only us, of course. And we’re trying always to find a way to solve it.
20:00
The other area is more about competition and that always makes CPMs or the pricing you need to pay for inventory going up. In that time it’s less of a concern because we see everything that is happening around the world makes a lot of advertisers reduce budgets. So you have one and more inventory because more and more people are moving to see those platforms. The other side you have less demand. So
20:28
It’s even good times for us. But yeah, it’s a challenge that will come back. We have no doubt about it. You talked about data privacy. I’d like to hear your take on the whole Google getting rid of the third party cookie thing, you know, and second question is, you know, like in Europe, there’s a very strong GDPR regulation. How more challenging it is to, you know,
20:57
get results from those companies understanding the local market there versus the US for instance? My thoughts about it are changing every once in a while. In one end I’m saying I’m enjoying when the advertisers know what I’m looking for. Let’s say I was looking to buy a car. I want to see different options. Like I’m enjoying to see ads from different vendors offering me different…
21:22
discounts or different options of cars just as an example and I prefer to have that instead of having I don’t know beauty consumables That are not related to me. And so I think the ability to track you and know Who is or as a user there is upsides for that. Okay, it can make me very relevant
21:47
but I’m aware of it and I know the downsides of it and I know that sometimes it can push me things that I don’t need to see or are misleading sometimes and people take it on the wrong end. So I think there should be a kind of a middle ground. I think at the end it’s causing everyone to shift the way they work a bit from the marketing angle I’m saying because you have less ability to target.
22:17
You are losing a lot of your abilities to optimize. You are in a way letting the algorithms of the platforms to just buy the media and do their work. You have no idea what is happening behind the scenes, which is at the end more power to those vendors as well. If again, four, five, six years ago, we were able to really see what we are targeting, how it behaves, what’s going on. Today, in many cases, you are just putting some assets.
22:46
putting your desired action and tell the algorithm, do your magic, which is always also okay. If you see results and you know how to monitor them, which is the second part of this issue that you can’t always see the results because they’re also based on cookies or different elements. So it’s a huge challenge. Thank you so much for this conversation. I really learned a lot again. You can find Or Hadar on linkedin. Link in the show notes. This was Brand Runner.