The operators edge

In this episode we talk about how the pivot happened to digital marketing from a predominantly offline business. The challenges that came during that period and how that challenge turned into an opportunity and then eventually into a scalable business. 

What is The operators edge?

This podcast series provides practical, real-world insights on scaling digital businesses and adapting to major marketing shifts.

Krishan:

It was February 2020, and we had just been told that we had to shut down 20 of our retail locations. We only had 20, and that was 90% of our revenue. That was the biggest shock to our business, and we had to make changes to survive. Welcome to episode one, retail to digital, how a COVID crisis became a company. This is The operators edge.

Krishan:

Every week or so, we sit down and talk about what happens with digital marketing and digital marketing businesses. This is a podcast series focused on building and running digital marketing agencies, not what you see every day or hear, you know, consistent stories. This is about what it's taken for us to build our digital marketing company and also all the ways that we've failed but come out the other side. My name is Christian Jelani with my cohost Manav Mehra. We have built digital marketing companies from scratch.

Krishan:

We have acquired digital marketing companies, and we are looking to expand rapidly. But in doing so, we want you to come with us so that you can understand and hopefully not make the mistakes that we've made, but grow with us during this process. This show is for founders, brand operators, digital marketing agencies that are also along this same journey and are willing and wanting to hear about things that other people will not talk about. No theory, no pitch decks, and what we're doing differently. Let's get into it.

Manav:

So tell me about the ecommerce side. Tell me about the business, the the brands you were running. What were you selling in terms of the product? And what was the average order value? So just run through that so that everybody gets an idea.

Krishan:

Sure. So before COVID, we were very focused on retail and e commerce was more of an afterthought in the business. We had about 20 retail stores running right before COVID happened, and our focus was driving retention and new clients through our doors to make sure they came in and had the full customer experience. The reason why is because our products were more touch and feel type products. They were in the hair and beauty space, so it's a variety of products.

Krishan:

But the interaction was important because the AOV was about $350 And so that's not a product that you can easily purchase without more than one interaction. So it's not an immediate purchase or an impulse buy. Therefore, it was important for us to and we saw success around those stores. And so that's why we opened so many. And our goal was to try to make them more efficient.

Krishan:

But we were sort of very comfortable in our space as a retailer. But we knew that we had to engage in e commerce because it was the way of the future. And obviously we had to go where people were shopping, but we didn't really know how. And only 10% of our sales Manav were in e commerce at that time, 90% were retail. Right.

Krishan:

And just imagining

Manav:

the scale of that, I mean, 20 stores meant inventory, staffing, meant leases, meant, I don't know how many other overheads, right? So that operationally must have

Krishan:

been a huge undertaking. Yeah. So we had retail, we had about two and a half people per store. When I say half, it's basically a part time person. And there were, approximately between any given time 60 to 65 retail staff.

Krishan:

We then had operations to fulfill all stock in the stores. We had obviously ERP systems that we had to consistently manage to review the ordering process and make sure that we had the right inventory being you know, we don't want inventory that's not selling to be coming in. And then also the accounting part and then the whole support structure for retail. I mean, it's gigantic. Right.

Manav:

So you said it's like only 10% was e com, right? And so why was it e commerce an afterthought up till that point?

Krishan:

I think this is a trap that businesses tend to fall into when they find a space that they're comfortable in, when they have fatter margins, and they understand if they deploy their resources, they can get a return on that investment where they're not having to risk investment with an unsure return. So if I opened a store and we spent a $100,000, then I know what the return of that that even it might take a little longer because the change of the buying habits. But if I spent a $100,000 on ecommerce, I wouldn't know what the returns would be. So it's a little bit of a trap that we fall into once we've seen a little bit of success and understand, you know, we get comfortable, man.

Manav:

Yeah, I know, I get that. And, know, because I'm trying you know, imagine AOV average order value of $350 right? It's in the beauty industry. So the customer relationship in a retail environment is very important, right? There's touching of the product, if you need- Yeah,

Krishan:

one of the average time for a person or a client that comes into our store, the interaction would be about thirty to forty five minutes. Right. So once, and the conversion at that point was about 95% because once they're in the store, it's such a unique experience that, and the entire, you know, it's more of a consultation than a sale. Right. And at that point you really sort of buy into the brand and trust and the product.

Krishan:

Right.

Manav:

So now you've got this, you know, you have this sort of a big behemoth that you're running on the retail side and the beauty side, right? And then COVID hits. Yeah. And that's the time everything changed for you, right? So what was that like?

Manav:

Like, or the moment that everything changed, like this is flipping it on its head.

Krishan:

Mean, I think change Manav is an understatement. It was a disaster. I think that, I mean, I didn't sleep for two months straight. I think that, you know, if you have a retail business and you not because of anything you've done yourself, you know, bad decisions or change of buying habits or bad marketing or anything else, it's just whatever happens in the world. And then the government dictates that you have to close down all of your basically revenue generating verticals, then, you know, it was a disaster.

Krishan:

We had to basically, within two weeks, determine that everything had to be shut down. We had to either lay off or furlough about, you know, 65 people. And then during that time, you know, we have all sorts of commitments. We have to decide how we're going to sort of get back on our feet or wait it out. And, and so we made some sort of drastic decisions at that time.

Manav:

And there's no playbook for this, right? Nobody knows how to manage this in a pandemic. Like there's no instruction manual for this. This is just, you just have to think of everything on the fly.

Krishan:

Yeah. So we went from about 75 people to nine. Right. And that was in the span of two weeks in terms of retail, but then we had to cut back on our operating staff too because we couldn't afford it, right? So 90% of our revenue evaporated.

Krishan:

We still had all our inventory, our receivables that we had to pay in terms of our suppliers. We to, we still had commitments of our leases. We had all of our, you know, payables for other costs that we still had, that we'd incurred. And now we were looking into the abyss and not knowing what was going to happen. And the 10% of our revenue that was left.

Krishan:

So if we're, you know, if we're generating over 8 figures and we're, you know, down to like a month, right, we're talking about annually 8 figures, then we've gone from like over a million dollars in revenue down to under a $100,000. And we don't have enough cash to support our expenses. And so we had to make some really hard decisions. And really the decision was the 10% remaining in e commerce had to become everything. And how do we then really push hard into growing that into possibly supporting our brand and our clients for the future?

Krishan:

Yeah. And not

Manav:

to mention the millions of dollars in inventory locked up in the stores, right? So, I mean, primarily, you just had to do something you've never done before. You didn't have a team. You didn't have too much knowledge of digital marketing, of e commerce, of any of the online selling mechanisms, Nothing.

Krishan:

It was like- was just fulfillment.

Manav:

It was just fulfillment, right? Right. Yeah. So then what happened? What was your next step?

Manav:

So then I called you, man. I said, look,

Krishan:

we need to figure out how to generate traffic. I mean, to be honest, one good thing is, you know, we've had an established brand for at that point over thirteen years. So we had really loyal customers and a client base who had been with us, you know, for this growth period. And really we were trying to now provide them with a way for them to purchase and, you know, continue to be inside the brand with the restrictions of the universe being COVID. So what we needed to do is make sure that our website was optimized, that we had everything set up, but we didn't know how to really do any of that.

Krishan:

And so then it was about what do we need to do to drive traffic, both new clients and our repeat clients to the website, and then how do we fulfill those orders to make sure that we can sort of come back and stand on our feet and cover our costs and, you know, come back to life. Okay, Manav, so you get a call from me saying, Manav, hey, it's KJ, you know, COVID has stopped my world and we have this opportunity, as I saw it to build our business back through, I mean, at that time, I didn't really see the opportunity. It was just survival to be honest, right? We were like, okay, there's something that we have to do because we have no other options. It's survival, right?

Krishan:

So I call you and I say, Manav, we need to build a digital marketing team. What do you do?

Manav:

Yeah, so yeah, I remember that. So I'll tell you what I was doing up till that point. So luckily, as you know, I was already setting up a processes service business for financial services catering to The US and UK. So I had some experience in, you know, kind of getting teams working, managing projects. And being from financial services, I kind of had a little bit of experience in how to set up these little departments.

Manav:

And when we got the call, mind you, I also did not know anything about digital marketing. I didn't know what it was really. I didn't understand it much because I never really done it. But I understood at that point that it had to be done. And there is an opportunity here because, you know, we're- So how did you even know where to begin?

Manav:

So I didn't know where to begin. I just started talking to people, figuring out what to do, what it is, started studying on it. And then the one stroke of luck we had was that we were able to find this one company which had a fantastic digital marketing team of, I think, six people at that time or seven people. And they were going out of business. So we, I think, took the right step in kind of aqua hiring those first team of six, seven people.

Krishan:

How did you know they were good? I did not. So you gambled. It was

Manav:

a complete gamble. We went in, I remember going in, interviewing all of them. And if the answers sounded correct, then they were, yeah, fine, come on board. And they were losing their jobs, so they were like, fine, yeah, they were ready to do anything, right? So they came on board and at least got us started.

Manav:

I think out of this initial six or seven, half of them quit within the first month. And then that was the first challenge of actually hiring people from an industry you don't know anything about, right?

Krishan:

So I guess, Manav, I would ask you, if I'm somebody listening to this, you've gone in, you've hired a team of people, you don't really know their expertise. What did they do well? Or what was their proclaimed expertise that you knew that could fit what I needed at that time to help defend and protect our, and survive the brand?

Manav:

Right. So the one thing I realized that they knew very well was SEO. What is SEO? So SEO search engine optimization, right? We're talking, you know, 2020 when now all the search is online, it's on Google, and more and more people, because they're home, they're on the internet, or they're searching more.

Manav:

So I'm like, okay, you know, there's a play here because that's the harder part. But digital marketing, you know, is a very wide canvas, right? It's big. So where do you start? Which one you pick?

Manav:

This time SEO picked us. We didn't pick it, they picked it picked us, and I'm so thankful it did, because that's what the real asset has been for us But

Krishan:

why for this are you thankful specifically for SEO?

Manav:

Because it's from a, you know, 30,000 foot perspective, whatever we did six years ago is still giving us traffic today. So unlike, let's say, in ads where, you know, once you stop running it, the business stops or the traffic stops. What we did six years ago is still giving us traction delay. So that's a real asset, right? It took time.

Manav:

It was very frustrating. It has so many moving parts, but the team was really good at it. So I'm like, okay, guys, SEO is, let's start with this. Build a team around SEO. Just started building one by one, one by one.

Manav:

And we grew to, I think in the next two years, to about 52 people on, you know, doing just SEO content.

Krishan:

And you're just doing it for my brands?

Manav:

At that point, yes. Okay. At that point, we were just doing it for your brands. And then I think, you know, the light bulb moment came and when people started asking us, when they started seeing the graph go up, you know, luckily in digital marketing, everything is very visible, right? You know exactly how much

Krishan:

it affects But Manas, like when you think of digital marketing, so, you know, with a brand doing 8 figures and it's lost all its revenue basically at that time. Okay, SEO is important. I get it. But you know, from what we've understood, it takes time. Yes.

Krishan:

But there is no time because we don't have time, otherwise we're going to die. Right. So what happens then to try

Manav:

to fill that gap? So these are not like none of these activities are mutually exclusive, right? So while we're building the SEO engine, you are trying to build the paid side and the email side and the CRO side, right? Some activities which we're probably not doing in house, so you're looking for agencies, right? And then, you know, we knew what happened with that and we'll get to that.

Manav:

But the base, you know, I see it like the base of a pyramid was SEO. That started showing results in the first six to eight months. But what were the,

Krishan:

I mean, you said you got from, you know, you aqua hired this team, then you went to 52 people. There must have been trials and tribulations through that process.

Manav:

Oh yes, yes.

Krishan:

So, you know, can you describe a few, Because I think one of the things that people who are probably listening to this show and are looking at whether it's agencies or looking at their own internal processes, whether if they have a brand or a marketing team inside their company and they want to do it, you know, internally and make sure that, you know, they have that expertise in house, what are the key things that you saw or the experiences that you went through building that team that, you know, you would want to share with people so they don't get burnt?

Manav:

Right. So in a sense, first and foremost, I got burnt a lot hiring the wrong people, right?

Krishan:

And why is that? Is it because we needed to do it?

Manav:

We needed to do it. The couple of pitfalls, I would think, there are two actually, which, you know, you got to be careful of. One is hiring too fast, and then the second is letting go too late. So if you've hired incorrectly, let go very quickly. That's pretty much the message I would like to The thing with hiring for SEO is that you will not know the capability till the person is at least three months old in the

Krishan:

Oh, okay. So that's important because I think, you know, when you think of people speaking to agencies, one of the things that I think is important for us to explain or divulge is what people go through that, or agencies do or don't do, that they don't explain. Right. Right? What's behind the curtain that when you build an agency or you're building a team specifically for what we do that people don't know about?

Krishan:

And I think that's really important, what you just said.

Manav:

Right. So one is that you must know how much time a person is going to need. So you're not, you know, you can get a really good digital marketer, but you may have put them in the wrong process. So if somebody is really good at, let's say, paid marketing, and unfortunately, you put them in CRO, that's an issue because that's just not the right match of a skill. So you want to make sure that you've got the right person in the right job.

Manav:

And specifically for SEO, it takes a bit of time. You're going to need three to four months to see what the person knows, if she's going to move the needle, or it's, you know, just a lot of activity and no output. So I think one thing we have to get very clear while building a team is measuring activity versus output from your team. So they can be a lot of noise. They can be doing 25 activities a day, but what is your real output?

Manav:

And that's a real way I would now, and I do now hire for this team, is I don't look at the activities, I look at the output. Right.

Krishan:

And so if you think of another example of why we were able to be successful building the team here, Is that because we were able to build a bench? Cause I know you've mentioned that to me in the past, like, do you want to describe that so, you know, the audience can understand what building a bench and that flexibility allows you to have?

Manav:

Yes. So again, pick this whole bench concept from my financial services side.

Krishan:

Okay.

Manav:

So the, you know, when you have a team of fifty, sixty people, attrition is also sometimes a problem.

Krishan:

Right, right.

Manav:

Of course. Then we're talking about a time where everybody wanted digital marketers. You know, people were offering two, three X for, you know, for employees.

Krishan:

What does two, three X mean?

Manav:

Two, three times of what I was paying then.

Krishan:

They're going to snag them away.

Manav:

Just to snag them away because they've been trained by us and we spend a lot of time and effort training people. So what you want to do is, and a lot of them you can stop, a lot of them you cannot. So what you want to do is you want to have a person shadowing them at every point of time or having one person shadow two people, and that's what I call the bench. So if one of these guys leave, I'm not in a situation where suddenly I have to go higher and then retrain, because one thing we did very successfully, which I think a lot of people don't do anymore, is we take a lot of time teaching our marketers the product they're marketing. So unfortunately, lot

Krishan:

of So that's important. I don't think we've touched upon that. So can you sort of dive deeper into Sure.

Manav:

So one thing I realized with other digital marketing agencies, when we were hiring them for our brands back in the day, is that you had one digital marketer trying to market 30 products, right? Didn't understand or she didn't understand any of them. It was just templated cut, paste, cut, paste, cut, paste, right? So what we did was we're like, okay, this is not going to work. So we would actually bring in the product they were marketing, take them through each and every aspect of it, tell them what the benefits are, what the features are, what the drawbacks are.

Manav:

So they know who their customer is and what they're marketing to. And that was a very important part of our training. So that would make it more difficult for us to replace people because then we would have to do the training again. So what we did was we made a bench of pre trained people sitting ready to go in case somebody left. So my brand or my client would never know that, you know, there's been attrition in that side.

Manav:

But isn't

Krishan:

that expensive? I

Manav:

mean, it does affect your margins, of but it, you know, you make it up with the long time value of the customer.

Krishan:

If the

Manav:

client stays longer, it's not even an issue. It's not something you want to do. And they will only stay longer if you do quality service. And how will you do, give quality services if your team keeps changing every six months, right? It's not going to happen.

Manav:

So that's a net, and that's something we did, which I did not see other people do.

Krishan:

Yeah. So, okay. So setting the stage, here you are building this team, you know, in 2020, moving into 2021, And we're starting to see some, I think, volume coming back to the business, but it's still not fast enough and we still don't have the full expertise in digital marketing. Right? So while you're doing that, I am now trying to still, trying to fill the gaps.

Manav:

Yes.

Krishan:

So at that time we looked at, really specialized Google Ads agencies because we said, you know what, that's something people are searching online, they're spending their lives looking at the screen and they're shopping. Right? Right. It's almost like revenge shopping their home. And so we need to be found and everybody's throwing money online in digital marketing.

Krishan:

So it's something that we have to do. So we hired these agencies. We hired a Google Ads agency. Then we hired an email marketing agency because we understood that we needed to touch base with our, our repeat clients or, you know, clients that are already purchased from us and that people were coming into our funnel. We could touch them again with, you know, better promotions or a way for them to, you know, to see us consistently.

Krishan:

And then the last part was we also understood that the people that were coming to the site weren't converting as we wanted them to. So we hired a CRO agency. And if you don't know what CRO is, it's conversion rate optimization. And really conversion rate optimization is talking about how do you use the real estate on the webpage to make sure that you can try to drive the traffic based on almost like behavioral psychology on the website to get people further towards checkout and conversion. So the colors on the page, the colors of the buttons, where things are located, and how people behave as they they, you know, their purchasing experience through the website.

Krishan:

So we were going through all of that and there's a lot that we learned.

Manav:

Yeah. So, and first, first and foremost, what we had to learn were the acronyms like, we didn't know what CRO meant and PPC meant. And if you remember that, right? So basically, you're telling the world that we knew nothing. We knew nothing, right?

Krishan:

It's something, and this is, we didn't know nothing, but we've already had a successful retail business for the last ten years.

Manav:

Yes, successful. You were running a successful retail business. I was in the financial services business, again, know, chugging along very nicely, and suddenly just got thrown into this world of digital marketing, which, you know, like, I didn't want to know anything about it. I didn't know anything about it, but we're like, okay, here we are. Okay, let's figure this out, right?

Manav:

And so at that point, okay, the SEO engine is being built up. It's chugging along nicely as well. But what about the paid side? You cannot ignore that. What about the email side?

Manav:

And then what about the conversion rates? You've got all these people coming to your site, but nobody's buying anything, right? So what are you doing? So that's the time when you went and you said, Okay, let's get some expert help from these agencies, right? And you went, I remember you going and you finding the top 10 in The US and hiring them.

Manav:

So what happened there? Which one? Oh, start with any man, your favorite.

Krishan:

Look, I think that, you know, everybody has the right to build their business and generate sales and, you know, develop a business. You know, when we hired our first Google Ads company that it was difficult because it was difficult I think it was unusual. And the reason why I say unusual is because through the SEO experience that we'd or the success we'd seen by developing the SEO muscle with you, that I'd also learned a lot. And when most people start or they connect with or hire a Google Ads or a paid ads agency, a lot of the times they don't have maybe the insight that we had developed.

Manav:

Right.

Krishan:

And what we found was that as we spent, you know, between 30 to 50 to $100,000 on ads in a month, that the return on that wasn't what we expected based on what we had been promised. And when, you know, you pull back the curtain, you recognize there's different ways that ad agencies can, and I'm trying to be very diplomatic here, Fudge or can explain the figures that promote their work success.

Manav:

And

Krishan:

so, and if I'm not diplomatic, I'm saying that there's branded and unbranded campaigns and that a lot of digital, these ad companies will take success for the brand equity you've already built with your clients and that people are already searching for and tell you that they're driving traffic to your website, but those people were already searching for you. And this is when Pmax had just started. Do you remember all this? Yeah, yeah. And so Pmax didn't have negative keywords.

Krishan:

And so if they were searching for your brand name, then, you know, Pmax couldn't knock it out. And so the Google ads was getting the success.

Manav:

Right. And I remember one of the agencies, because we were in the system, so we knew the numbers better. And I still remember the one of the agencies who was doing the paid side for us, for the brand, specifically for the brand, kind of dropped us like a hot potato the moment we started asking them these questions because they had no answers.

Krishan:

That's

Manav:

right. And that's the, I think that's the point we realized, listen, we've got to do all of this ourselves.

Krishan:

So just explain, I think it's important for, I mean, you and I both know this, but what has dropped us like a, like a, like a sack of potatoes?

Manav:

I, I, so I remember this when we were sitting there running the numbers and looking at the campaign figures and we went back to them and said, These numbers aren't what you're presenting it to be. Because again, like you were saying, it was mostly branded campaigns, right? And they were showing a massive ROAS and we were like, Oh, look how well we've done.

Krishan:

I mean, I'm talking about ROAS in like 15 to 18.

Manav:

15 to 18. And that's what you've got to be careful about, right? And we went back to them and we broke the numbers down because, you know, again, coming from ecom and then finance, we broke it down and we went back to them. Their response was, okay, this is all that we can do. If you're not happy, you can go somewhere else.

Manav:

Something like that. I don't remember the exact thing, but they were happy for us to leave. Yeah. Because I don't think at that point anybody had asked them these questions or drilled down so deep into the data. Or the attribution.

Manav:

Or the attribution, right? I mean, that's a whole new episode, right? Which we'll get into. By the way, I love attribution. I know, I know, I know.

Manav:

You've chalked my ear off about attribution. And eventually that's what it all comes down to, attribution, right? And this is what happened with these agencies, is that when we pushed them on the attribution data, they did not have convincing answers. And that's the time we realized, okay, even this we've got to do in house now. So what happened then?

Manav:

Then we started building the strength on the bait On

Krishan:

bait side, right?

Manav:

Yeah. And then 5%.

Krishan:

Remember paid also means social, right? So it's not just

Manav:

Social ads, Google ads, all of that. So it was just not Google ads. It's also meant Meta, right? And at that time

Krishan:

And TikTok hadn't really even was,

Manav:

yeah, TikTok was not on the scene at

Krishan:

that think it was

Manav:

called Musically at that time. Musically or something like that. Yeah. So I think that happened as well. And then you went to other agencies as well.

Manav:

I remember the CRO agency. Yeah. So the CRO agency, I mean,

Krishan:

I, okay, look, I think the CRO side, they have almost a more rigorous, empirical process. And the one that we hired actually did a really good job with that process. And if anybody doesn't know when you run CRO, conversion rate optimization, execution, then what you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to have two different landing pages. For example, I have my standard one that has the button on the left side and then I have my, that's my A test and I have my B test and I'm going to put the button on the right side and I'm going to change the color of the button, let's say. And then I'm going to drive half the traffic to the left side or to, you know, option A and then half the traffic to option B and then determine which one drives higher conversion rates.

Krishan:

And so what happened was we ran this for more than a year and it was expensive, but what we realized is that the incremental increase in the conversion rate was so minimal. And when we pushed back on the CRO agency to say, look, we're spending all this money, we expected based on your commitments to us, based on your experience of other brands that you've worked with, a 15 to 20% increase in the conversion rate. And I'm not saying increase in sales. I'm saying if the conversion rate was 1%, we're saying we can get you to 1.15%. Right?

Manav:

Right.

Krishan:

That was significant for us because again, we had to convert the traffic, you know, we had to drive sales to make sure that we got back on our feet. And what we realized, Manav, is that CRO is very, very effective for lower priced products. Yes. That's the giveaway. So if, you know, people are watching this, if you're selling $25 pair of socks and you're, you know, Amazon does this well.

Krishan:

Yes. Like they've got this thing down or any sort of brand that has, you know, lower or more impulse buy products. But if you're sitting at higher valued or more trust required products as an e commerce brand, then CRO is not the answer. The answer is trust. You have to build the trust.

Krishan:

And that was the learning for us. And so that was another failure that we went through.

Manav:

Yeah, absolutely. Expensive, expensive. That was an expensive one. Yeah. But I think I still feel that taught us a lot.

Manav:

Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, was insane, right? I mean, I think, you know, when you're talking about Because,

Krishan:

you know, February, you know, coming back to us, we have CRO clients now too.

Manav:

Yeah. A bunch of them. And it's, yeah, it's also what we had learned is now a part of the process, which is helping all our CR clients. But, you know, coming back to what you're saying, if it's too high value a product, you know, 500, 600, 700, then the output may be a little lower, right? Even on something.

Manav:

It's just like, you know,

Krishan:

setting It's just, I think like that, a you know, it's sort of like having that store when the person comes in, they're with you for forty five minutes and you're building the trust in those forty five minutes. But if you come to our website and you spend a minute and a half, three minutes, five minutes, you still haven't got the trust to make that conversion the first time or to purchase. So you have to come back. And that's where Manav, the email marketing actually really comes in. And that's where we also realize that we need to keep going back to our clients with more information, better product knowledge, anything that we can do to establish, I guess, knowledge, what's the term, like not superiority, but I guess a knowledge bank where they can be a credibility, I think, probably.

Manav:

Yeah. But you know, I mean, I actually love CRO as a service. I'll tell you

Krishan:

why because Or, that's right. We're not knocking CRO.

Manav:

Yeah. No, I'll tell you why I love it, right? Because when you show the client the lift, like what we've done, right? When we actually go back and he sees a lift, the joy they feel is incredible because it's actually affected their back pallets, right? This is not just, you know, vanity metrics.

Manav:

This is something which is going to put more money into your account. So I understand it's probably the hardest out of all the elements in marketing, I would feel today, but it is by far the most rewarding as an agency to show the results to your client, which we do, you know, regularly. Think you're most most key key as well,

Krishan:

Is that this is not like a poo pooing of what we've done. It's basically a learning.

Manav:

It's a learning, yeah.

Krishan:

Right? So what we're trying to do here is tell people what our experience was and how we have used that to build our agency to better perform.

Manav:

Right.

Krishan:

Right. So now we can understand CRO and provide that knowledge to our clients.

Manav:

Exactly. And that comes back to the email side. So now, and I think that was a huge earner

Krishan:

for the brand.

Manav:

Huge. Huge earner. And I was, I was really skeptical It's about spending that money on

Krishan:

still one of our biggest biggest for email, with the whole deliverability stuff that happened, I think two years ago, I mean, emails taken a hit, but it's still a big, a big component of this.

Manav:

I something which cannot be ignored, you have to keep doing it and it's gonna give you results, especially once, the client is in your funnel and then you've delivered the services or get them back to resell, to upsell, to cross sell everything. It's a massive, it's a really good tool. And I feel brands don't use it enough. I feel like I'm

Krishan:

frustrated. Is that just because they think it's passe now or?

Manav:

Yeah, I think, you know, whenever I speak to people about, you know, about their strategy, emails always have the last of it. And they're like, Oh, I don't know if this one works. Never opened any of my emails. It's not about that opening, if you're opening your emails, right? A lot of clients do open it.

Manav:

The open rates are not as bad as people think. It's almost like, you know, it was something like you're saying of the past and they don't want do it anymore. I see a resurgence in it. I think it's going to be very bottom of the funnel clients will be reading and coming through your emails. Right, right.

Manav:

It's almost like, you know, when you speak to clients about the strategy and you know, they're like, okay, well, you know, what's my strategy? And we say, okay, you need to do SEO. No, SEO takes too much time. You know, it's expensive. No, it's not.

Manav:

It does take time. Yes, it can get expensive if you're not doing it correctly. So I think these two, and everyone's kind of focusing on the paid side, which is very important, but you cannot forget the other two aspects, elements of the digital marketing sort of world.

Krishan:

Okay. So, you know, we've now gone through this story of COVID forcing our hand, right? And us diving in headfirst, you know, cannonball, whatever you want to call it, into a rushing river, unknowing what's at the bottom and not sure because we didn't have a chance, right? So basically, or choice, it was basically survival or death.

Manav:

Yeah, exactly.

Krishan:

And did we survive? Thrived. What's the good news?

Manav:

Happy to report we thrived. I mean, from the ecom brand, as you know, and you can talk about that is But

Krishan:

let's talk about it from the digital marketing side. So what success did we see from all the work that was being done, all the fingers that we burnt ourselves. Right. And where did we come out on the other end?

Manav:

So I think the first, moment happened when we got the call from one of the competitors of yours to start doing their digital marketing, if you remember.

Krishan:

Was, And was that shock?

Manav:

Was that? That was interesting because they saw what was happening with it, like, you know, how are these guys doing it, right? And they called, I think they called you and you knew them and they're like, okay, you know, can you do it for us? And then the first one came and the second one came. That's when you realized this is a business here, right?

Krishan:

Need to Manav, diversify think you have to be clear, right? Is that, you know, we're running everything for our own internal brands. Right. And we're not set up to take clients. No, we're not.

Krishan:

So how did that happen?

Manav:

So we had to

Krishan:

be And then we're not set up to take enterprise clients.

Manav:

Oh, they were all big clients, like massive companies, right? But did it almost break you? It almost broke the team and me trying to now segment all the clients into different little teams, right? Because we had one massive team doing your brands. So now I had to build teams out for them because these were not small brands.

Manav:

They were large companies. They needed a proper reporting structure. So did you

Krishan:

have to go in and hire even more staff?

Manav:

We had to go in and hire more staff.

Krishan:

So you're talking about doubling the number of people?

Manav:

No, luckily we didn't double, have to double because we had the processes in place. We could actually have more people segment themselves activity wise and expertise wise, rather than adding more, throwing more bodies at it. Because by that time we had understood the business. We had understood what runs what well. So we didn't, I didn't have, if I got three brands, I didn't hire three times the more.

Manav:

And are

Krishan:

you saying brands for what service primarily? All SEO. It was

Manav:

all SEO. All SEO. All it

Krishan:

was in your wheelhouse. Because they,

Manav:

it was in my wheelhouse because they could see it, to see the SEMRush account, right? And you can see whether the person is doing. They could see it and that's, that's, that's the real proof of the pudding when they see the graph going up.

Krishan:

Yeah. Yeah. And I still remember my colleagues, you know, it's called colleagues. They also, it was like the, when you say the happiness or I don't know what the term is, but satisfaction after they started seeing the success of the SEO deployment. Yes.

Krishan:

And the, because we're talking about an enterprise client that has multiple brands. Not talking about a singular

Manav:

brand. I remember one of them had, I think 12 brands. Right. And they were like, Oh, we need 12 brands. Wow, okay.

Manav:

Good problem to have, but sort of problem, you know? Like we had to learn every aspect of the brand before you could start. So that was the, but that was trial by fire. That was, you know, which side are you going to come out? Are going come out burnt and singed, or are going to come out stronger?

Manav:

Yeah. Luckily, happy to report, came out much stronger because we had no choice but to make it work. Simple as that. Now the clock was down, the meter was rolling, and we had to do it.

Krishan:

Focus primarily on SEO. Sure. Okay. All right. So now we're talking about coming out the other side and now looking at taking on clients.

Krishan:

And at what point do we start looking at external growth? Is that something we move into here now?

Manav:

That's too much better. So