How To Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing
Originally published by Authority Magazine on Medium
Let the data fight your battles for you. As long as you are working with genuinely actionable and real-time data, trust in it. Act accordingly to the data you collect without constantly second guessing yourself.
Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.
In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tommy Lamb.
Tommy Lamb is a marketing professional with 20 years experience, 10 of which have been devoted to lifecycle/CRM management. He has led and managed extensive marketing initiatives across owned and emerging channels in fashion, beauty, gifting, luxury, startups, and agencies.
He believes in big-picture thinking, is highly analytical, and delights in using data to scale automation for his brands. He and his team up-level channels and programs for brands by using actionable data, incremental revenue measurement and differentiated personalization to monetize existing customers.
In addition to actionable data, Tommy has a passion for delivering the right messaging to the appropriate cohort at the most opportune time in their journey. He encourages his team to seek out every opportunity to fine tune the messaging throughout the path to purchase.
He believes that empathy for the consumer experience is the most important aspect of communicating to customers effectively. “Personalization is a form of empathy,” he notes. “Sending the same messaging to everyone is belligerent.”
Tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Igrew up farming and ranching in southern Utah. I always had a love of anything creative and wanted to combine that joy with employment. I first began marketing in high school making real estate flyers for homes in the area. I realized how fascinating it was that an image and some words could get someone to not necessarily take the action, but reel them in and continue the conversation. From there I worked for a couple of nonprofits in college and moved to Los Angeles in 2007 to work for a commercial shopping mall developer in the marketing department. It was amazing being a one-man show because I got to wear all of the hats and learn what I really loved, which was digital marketing. From there I moved on to Lucky Brand Jeans and continued in fashion and beauty until where I’m at now with the agency WITHIN, where I’m building out this product and service with a rockstar team across many different brands in many different verticals.
The funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting?
The funniest marketing mistake I have made was accidentally sending two million Lucky Brand emails from my vice president’s work email account. This was due to a drop-down feature within our email provider and since his email was one off of our intended account to send from, info@luckybrand.com. He was able to laugh it off and later thanked me because he was actually able to reconnect with a lot of lost friends.
Who are you grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
I am grateful for a lot of strong female leaders who have helped shape not only my career but myself along the way. Beth Monda was the person who gave me my first chance at Lucky Brand which has since led to opportunities across three different companies and four roles from 2012 to 2018. It’s amazing when you have someone who you work with that you connect with so well that you can finish each other’s sentences and support each other in your career growth along the way. The next most impactful person in my life is my current boss Courtney Addy. She is radically transparent and vibrant and is someone who I continue to learn from on a daily basis. She was and continues to be light at the end of the tunnel and has really made WITHIN feel like home.
What do you think makes your company stand out?
WITHIN has a unique offering to other performance marketing agencies in that it truly thinks like someone inside the brand. The teams are made up of subject matter experts who bring decades of combined brand experience to the partners we work with. I knew immediately that my years of experience on the brand side of things would add value to the team and company at large as we built out the lifecycle offering, which is unique to this industry.
Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?
I try not to take things too seriously. We aren’t saving lives, we’re just trying to make them better for our brands and customers. Make sure to laugh.
I try to prove myself wrong every day. For example, I prefer to let data make an argument for me. There’s no reason that my opinion should take precedence over someone else’s especially when we test to prove a theory.
Whether it’s my team, cross functional partners, or a brand or customers, it’s really about how you can help. There are studies that show that even personalization for the sake of personalization is harmful unless it’s helpful.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now?
I am very excited to be working on some big projects around segmentation and how we think about customers by affinities, traffic sources and their own behavior. We’re trying to figure out how to best navigate the minefield of increasing consumer privacy while holding the customers hand throughout their lifecycle in a meaningful way.
In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.
Some of the biggest mistakes companies make is not completely understanding the full features set in the platform that they’re using and not medicating against knowledge loss. Employees inevitably are going to try to move on to bigger and better things. I advocate with a lot of the platforms that I work with to go in and remind brands of what they do and how they do it and why they have a relationship with them in the first place. So often a brand will pivot from a platform, not because they’re unhappy with it, but because they don’t know how to use it. The story is true across almost every brand that I work with. If I were to summarize this up in just one sentence it would be: The platform just needs some love.
If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like?
Consider what the gaps are in your customer experience. Do you bring joy and delight at every step? If not, build out those touchpoints, test against them, prove yourself wrong and be sure that you’re driving incremental revenue and not just moving money from one into another. Ask yourself what feels good from the perspective of the customer. We all know what to do. We all know when we get an email or a text message that we furrow at because it’s confusing and not helpful. We just have to be brave enough to stand in the conference room and raise our hand and say, “Wait, let’s look at this another way.”
In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?
The best PPC platforms that produce the best results to increase sales are the ones that focus on the customer. Listen to the consumers. Let them tell you what cohorts you should build and which audiences to go after, not the other way around.
Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?
First, find a way to leverage actionable and real-time data.
Next, measure for incrementality, the pull-forward effect, and the halo effect.
Make sure to put together a testing schedule in order to iterate and optimize.
What are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?
They aren’t mutually exclusive, though with email marketing the channel is “free” so you can prove out tests and campaigns here before you spend money on them with PPC. Similar to running a successful PPC campaign, the first thing to keep in mind is finding and leveraging actionable and real-time data. Then, measure for incrementality, the pull-forward effect, and the halo effect. And third, put together a testing schedule to iterate and optimize.
What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about?
I’m a big fan of any marketing tool that consolidates an otherwise tall marketing stack. I’d rather have a good platform that connects site paid email SMS push messaging than have a Cadillac in every channel that doesn’t communicate across platforms. There is synergy to be had when you can discover the true incremental value of each respective touchpoint in each channel per customer. BlueCore, Iterable, and others have made massive strides at tech consolidation.
Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer?
I personally take a few cues from Greek philosophers as well as one of my favorite authors as of late, Jay Shetty.
Don’t judge the moment. Every situation, moment, and person has the opportunity to evolve into anything if you give them the chance to.
There is gratitude in everything, even failure. There are times when you are going to fall short. Instead of letting that set you back, be grateful for the chance you have to learn from your mistakes and to better yourself because of them.
Let the data fight your battles for you. As long as you are working with genuinely actionable and real-time data, trust in it. Act accordingly to the data you collect without constantly second guessing yourself.
We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Don’t get too down on yourself. We are often each our own worst critics. Find a way to push those negative voices out of your head and focus on the task at hand.
Kindness breeds kindness. People remember acts of kindness others do for them, no matter how big or small. This starts a ripple effect where eventually the people you act kindly towards will do the same for someone else.
What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday
Medium.com
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance — TED talk by Angela Lee Duckworth
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Do unto others what you would have them do to you. In other words: Do as much good as you can every day.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Follow me on LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/tommylamb
