Welcome to my quarterly review series, where I share my journey of growing Paire as Head of Growth.

Here is part 2 of my quarterly review.

3. Performance Marketing 💰

A) Invest In Conversion Rate Optimization

No matter how good your creative is, if your website bucket is leaking, you are burning cash.

It’s called a LEAKY BUCKET PROBLEM

Your paid media team is going to have burnout. Because they are pumping out creatives more than they should and they have done their best on improving the creative as much as they can. Yet, the metrics aren’t improving.

• e.g. They are meeting the benchmark of a winning ad: 30% hook rate, 15% hold rate, 90% thumbnail strength

But with the traffic they are sending to the site, only 5% of the traffic add to cart.

This is a problem.

In fact, a huge problem.

It's essential to focus on CRO (it’s a must tbh). Your website is less volatile than auction platforms like Facebook and Tik Tok. It doesn’t change based on the competitor’s bid to acquire traffic.

• i.e. your home page layout doesn’t change hour by hour whereas Facebook auction does (BEAR = bid, estimate, auction, result)

I have seen so many times throughout my audits on brands that the one thing that is holding them back is improving their CRO.

If you are still not convinced how CRO is important for your brand, have a look at these two formulas, and make sure you know this by heart:

Revenue = AOV x CVR x Visitors

Profit = (Visitors x CVR x LTV) - Variable Cost

And for me personally, I will be digging deeper into the world of CRO in Q2. (Will update you on my findings and learnings)

B) Remarketing Isn’t Growth

If you are working with an agency, and they come to you boasting about how they are achieving 5x ROAS with 30% of monthly ad spend with a high frequency.

Run. It’s a red flag. 🚩It's a false sense of success.

Because the truth is, remarketing isn’t growth!

While remarketing is essential for reminding new traffic of your brand and offer, it's important to understand that relying solely on remarketing doesn't lead to long-term growth.

If most of your budget goes towards remarketing, you will generate revenue, but your efficiency will start to decay because you are stressing your existing customers.

Growth happens when you crack your cold traffic campaigns.

Here’s a tip when working with an agency:

Tip 1: Are they improving the bottom line? e.g. daily profit is increasing?

Tip 2: Are they able to maintain CAC whilst increasing the budget?

Tip 3: They talk about how they increased your ROAS from 3 to 5 but with the same monthly budget. (It’s time for you to RUN).

C) Direct Mail + PR

PR is your true top-of-funnel traffic, IMO.

Not sure if everyone agrees with me or not, but Facebook is essentially your MOFU advertising engine. I will do a post on this but in a nutshell, Facebook knows who your buyers are. Whereas PR, offline stores, and OOH can be your true top-of-the-funnel engine.

Traffic built up through these channels can bring extra fuel to your paid social channels. Think of it as gasoline.

I’ve hired a new team member to dedicate part of their time to work on PR, it’s been really helpful. PR has been adding credibility to our cold and warm audiences.

There’s been such hype about direct mail and I tried it.

Result? So, so.

We used a direct mail company in the US and our customers thought it was a scam because the sender's address was from the USA. The majority of our customer base is in Australia.

Plus, our designs were covered by stickers. 🤦‍♂️

But I think it’s worth another try later on. Maybe we just had a bad print batch. They did cost around $3-4 per card. It was a disappointing experience tbh.

D) What Makes A Successful Campaign?

One of the myths you hear in marketing is that a new campaign needs “time to bed in.”

Often, this comment comes from the creative agency or the media buyer after the campaign has gone live and has failed to generate any sales.

A great campaign performs almost immediately - with an increase in website traffic and early sales data showing that it has potential. It’s a sigh of relief that this ad has resonated with the target market’s needs and desires.

A dud ad, shows nothing from the outset. It’s crickets. The soft metrics (CPC, CTR, CATC) don’t look good. Your marketing team can spend time to improve it or give more budget to ‘revive’ it. But it’s trying to make clay into gold.

Your marketing team members aren’t magicians or alchemists. They simply add gasoline to what is already working in your business.

4. Brand

A) Changing Our Positioning

We started as a sock brand but we realise there was a glass ceiling.

So we went back to our design agency and started drafting up Paire v2. We pivoted to a more mature apparel brand. We crystalized our concept, our values, and what our core demographic looks like.

Since our products were positioned at a premium price in the DTC market, the aesthetic change and our message change were necessary.

We also removed quantity breaks, so we look more like a fashion brand. We removed heavy first-customer discounts as we know that our whale customers don’t care about the discount.

It’s a long-term play for sure but it’s gonna pay back.

B) Branding Mixed With Performance Marketing = Holy Grail

I used to think DR is what we needed. The only thing we needed as we were a start-up.

But as we push towards a $10 million/year run rate, branding is required.

So we are now pushing stories, values and adding a character (literally called Pairey) into our emails, social media, and possibly billboards.

The reality is, building a product isn't difficult. Competitors can quickly create the same product at a lower price. As identical products are flooding in...you are now bidding for the same ad space to the same audience.

But when you get branding right...your brand becomes your moat. Not your product.

It becomes your differentiator and it allows your business to be stable and strong. (Good example being: mattress in a box market. To consumers’ eyes, it looks like a mattress regardless of the brand)

Another upside is that you can also charge a premium, allowing you to fuel the brand growth loop.

5. Breakthroughs + Reflections

Founders and managers often wrap their identities around the business and start to make biased decisions.

It's essential to step back and apply a second lens. Ask yourself, "What if I am actually wrong?"

It’s not self-doubt but knowing that your lens can be replaced with a better one.

We are very grateful for our hardworking team members. Q1's growth and breakthroughs wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for them. Seriously.

I always believed in working hard, but I never understood what "work smart, not harder" meant. But now I understand it. 😅 You still have to work hard though haha.

Your identity, beliefs, and frameworks must change for your business to grow (it’s woohoo, but it is a fact). You really have to become that person that managed a $10M/year brand. Become, do, have.

On a personal note, I am working intensely for three months and going off-grid for a few days. Also, I want to thrive instead of being in panic mode. It's one of the values that I am trying to instill in myself. Because what’s the point of running a business if you are going to panic all day? 🤔

This concludes my quarterly review of 2023! I hope you guys enjoyed it.

What did you like the most about my quarterly review? Let me know below.