In this episode I speak with Yoann Pavy, Head of Performance Marketing at Perkbox. We discuss his past experience at Deliveroo as their Head of Paid Social. We discuss how Deliveroo use paid social media to drive traffic and sales across multiple countries. We also discuss how Perkbox conduct their marketing. This includes experimenting with multiple different channels to see which areas help them grow most effectively. This is an interesting episode that focuses a lot around paid media. Perkbox is in super growth mode at the moment so this is an interesting insight into the strategies they are finding most effective for growth.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
I would say question everything. That’s kind of my motto. I think it’s very easy to have too much subjectivity in marketing teams and in businesses in general, like thinking things are not gonna work or we should change things for certain subjective reasons. I think everything should be tested before giving any conclusions.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
One that I read recently was by Adam Alter, called Irresistible. It was really cool because he talks about the rise of addiction in tech, and businesses that are keeping us hooked, like Instagram and stuff, and I recently had a first child, so me and my wife are definitely very interested in that, and should we have a tablet and should we have … You know, should kids have phones too early, et cetera, and the addiction bit of technology these days and digital is very interesting, but also I think a problem, so an interesting book.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
I would probably say Facebook Business Manager, just by my background, but nowadays I would probably say Salesforce because everything sits there, in terms of the business data, and that’s where we kind of pull the data to do analysis. If you ask me again in about one month, I’ll probably change my mind and tell you something else, like Mixpanel or something like that, but we’re really getting up to speed in analytics, so probably another analytics tool.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I think probably anything that Kanye West pulls off.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
One from Dylan Hey called The Social Media Growth Show, which has just started, I think, and it’s a very, very interesting one, more around the social media side of things, and the other one that I just got into is from Hotjar, actually. It’s called The Humans Strike Back, and interesting content there as well for everything marketing-related.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Yoann Pavy, head of performance marketing at Perkbox. Joann has a really interesting career history. Before he started at Perkbox, he was head of paid social for Deliveroo, and being at the forefront of performance marketing for two high-profile and fast-growing companies, I’m really looking forward to learning from Joann today. Let’s dive right in. Okay, yeah, so tell me about your background, and how did you get to the position that you’re in?
Yoann Pavy:
Okay, so I started working about eight years ago, came straight in the UK. I’m from France, as you can hear. I started as an engineer in automotive before moving into digital. I came across actually a Facebook post from a friend from school who was working for Facebook marketing partner called [Glow 00:01:55] at the time, and I decided to change career completely and join the startup, which I learned base of paid social and learned very interesting accounts and interesting campaigns for about a year, something, before coming across Deliveroo, and then building the marketing team, especially from performance marketing team, and I joined as a paid social manager there, then head of paid social, at the right phase right before the hyper growth that Deliveroo kind of experienced city by city across 12 countries.
Very interesting time, to then moving onto a much bigger role in another interesting UK startup called Perkbox, where now I am head of performance marketing, and looking not only at paid social, but across all digital, and also a bit of growth to power the growth of the company, so yeah, interesting last four years, I would say.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it’s a very interesting journey, and what career progression as well. I guess so it was your friend really that enticed you to move from France over to the UK. It’s quite a big jump, really. Did you have other friends and family over here?
Yoann Pavy:
No, no, no, no one, really. I made some friends on the way. Yeah, it was kind of a bold move. I would have never expected also my trajectory to be that fast, and I think digital in London is probably the best city to be in. It’s kind of the Mecca for startup, marketing, digital marketing sector, so yeah, I think it was kind of a bit of luck and taking the opportunity at the right time.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely. What enticed you, then, to move from project management into marketing? That’s, again, not just a move from France to the UK, but also a career change as well. What made you do that?
Yoann Pavy:
I always thought that I was a little bit more creative than the job I was doing, and I was curious about technology, but more specifically like social media and being able to use data, but also being creative about it, especially on Facebook, was something that was really interesting to me, and talking to millions of people at the same time with different messaging and see all how that influenced their behavior, et cetera, was really kind of fascinating, and changed so much in the past four years, but was already very interesting four years ago. So yeah, that’s why.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I obviously am biased, being in marketing as well, but I can totally see the pull from being in a project management role to actually coming over into a marketing role, particular with the changes in digital marketing and how things are growing, and the ability to track, and all these different, exciting things that happen at marketing these days. I can really see the pull. So I guess Glow is really where you learnt your craft, really, I guess.
Yoann Pavy:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I started with a smaller role in account management. I think there’s tons of agencies in London that can give you opportunities like that, to learn. I was slightly older than the majority of people, already in my mid-20s rather than early 20s, but I think if you’re keen to learn and curious about it, you can grow very fast personally, and learn a lot. That was kind of my mission as soon as I started, so then I continued and still continue to this day.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. I guess, if you wouldn’t mind, before we move onto Perkbox, I’d like to ask a few questions around Deliveroo. I know at Deliveroo you were head of paid social, and tell me a little bit more about the role. Was it creating ads on different social platforms to attract the audience, hit the audience with different messages, I presume?
Yoann Pavy:
Definitely that, so it was user acquisition-based, using paid social, mainly Facebook, but also Instagram and Twitter and a bit of Snapchat as well, but really to acquire to users, look at their behavior, and kind of scale from that. The very interesting part was the kind of growth that started literally when I started, about in the first three months, I think. I had to scale up user acquisition through Facebook for I think about 10 countries, and then 12, and about 100 cities, in a very granular way, so that was the biggest challenge, I think, and the most interesting part of the job was to see paid social differently. I think there’s a few companies like that that can only scale city by city and not in a country as a straight away, in like most companies would, so that was the challenge, and I think we’ve done very interesting work with Facebook directly to …
Similarly the things happen in the travel industry as well, to being very smart about geo-localization of people, and their smartphone, and be able to target people at the right time, at the right place, and you know, for example, showing you the best restaurant around you when you are looking at your Facebook, for example. That was very, very interesting work, and then working on the app and stuff like that. That was really interesting too, but really the challenge of the business model itself was the most interesting part.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting, and did you have a campaign, effectively, that you were just replication across the different countries, or were there big differences between the campaigns?
Yoann Pavy:
It was fairly different across countries because we realized very, very early on that food, it is a international, worldwide topic, but it is very different from country to country, and we had to adapt a lot of what we were doing based on the country and the local habits, food habits, of people, and adapt from that. I think the biggest win for us was made as soon as we started automated using DPA on Facebook, so dynamic product ads, in the same way ASOS would do it for clothes, we do it for restaurant based on where you are. That was very, very strong for us, and that was part of the interesting work we did directly with Facebook as well, and that was good.
Matt Byrom:
So you would show people specific ads based for specific restaurants based on their location.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
I guess in that case, would you actually pre-fill a range of ads based on different locations that Deliveroo operated in, and then you could actually serve those based on people that came into that location, and they were looking at Facebook, for example.
Yoann Pavy:
Yes. It would be fully dynamic based on list and different, yeah, flows that would literally in realtime show you what’s around you at the time, or where you are, so it’s really going into personalization to the best level as you can, you know? One-to-one messaging, to everyone looking at the ad would not see the same thing, if that makes sense, so that was really strong.
Matt Byrom:
Those dynamic ads are pretty much what you would say are the most successful for Deliveroo.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah. There were some brand campaigns and some interesting video stuff, but never as effective in terms of app install and user acquisition, for sure.
Matt Byrom:
You mentioned about video there. Is that something that you tested now that video is such a big focus on the social channels?
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah. It’s always something that we’ve tested. Not always the best thing we tested, and images and static images was always strong, and even at Perkbox we’re really keen on video, but I think unless the content is really strong and not a repurpose of, I don’t know, a TV campaign or something like that, it could work very well. The problems, it’s more on the execution, and that’s one of I would say the difficulty of working on contents in general for digital and for paid social.
From what I’ve seen, there is a shift happening or starting to happen in companies, especially companies that were marketing in-house, digital marketing in-house, in understanding that content for digital should be digital-focused, and really thought-through to be quality content, really add value to the user, and not just sell something or be something that is for something else, and you just took it, and cut it in six seconds and put it live, and that’s still happening, and it’s not an easy discussion because there is a lot of learning to be done internally from different teams, you know, creative teams and art directors, and roles like that, which needs to shift a bit more to digital and have this discussion of this digital first approach.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, and it’s something that we’re actually seeing in our business, you know. I’ve a marketing agency called Wise Owl, and we create different types of content, a lot of video, but also other types of content, and what we’ve found over the last few years or particularly the last sort of four, five years is that different types of content put out into the market really need to be fit for purpose. So they don’t just need to be sort of replicated across the channels, but they actually need to be made for those specific channels, and also need to be the best content that you could possibly create for those channels because there’s so many other people that are vying for attention there that you can’t just put a cut-up piece of content onto another channel, it’s really got to be totally suited for that channel to have the best impact.
Yoann Pavy:
Exactly. Exactly, and it really has to make the experience of the context better, and that’s something really hard to do, and I haven’t come across a lot of content like that in general, where you would see an ad, not necessarily think it’s an ad, but also like it. You know, it would surprise you, or create an emotion that would not be, oh, it’s an ad. Let me just scroll it through. That’s really hard, and I’ll probably talk about it a bit later at Perkbox. I have a good example of that.
Matt Byrom:
If we just finish this conversation around Deliveroo, if you were to give the listeners any takeaways in terms of what you learnt over your time at Deliveroo in terms of paid social, is there any sort of things that you would really suggest small, medium, large businesses, the range actually try in terms of paid social marketing? What’s worked for you? What have you learnt that is highly effective, and what could you pass on?
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, so from what I remember, the most important thing, and that’s something that I’m trying to really apply here now, is in the perspective of scaling, really scaling your business, and using digital for that, really try and think ahead of the curve, so what is it gonna look like on your Facebook account once you’re gonna get two, three, four, five times more accounts, and more campaigns. Is it scalable? Do I work with the right partner? Do I want to work with a partner?
Really take some time to think about it, because that will avoid some surprises and slow down down the road, and being a bit slowed because of that. I would also say to think about which partner, if you wanna go with an FMP. At Deliveroo, we tried a few. We worked with Nanigans and Smartly, and we tried MakeMeReach as well on paid social, and really take the time to know which partner would be the best for you, depending on your vertical and what you’re selling, because again, that would save you time and implementation time and learning, et cetera. That would be the best advice, I would say.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, so I guess from Deliveroo you moved to Perkbox, and if you could give us a bit of an introduction into what Perkbox does and who they are.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, Perkbox is a B-to-B company, as a cloud-based, employee perks and engagement platform on web and app for businesses of all sizes. The vision and the mission of Perkbox is actually very, very interesting because it’s about engage employees and make people happy and happier in their workplace, but in life in general, and stay for longer, and we created that platform, and reward, and to reward and recognize employees, and for them to become more productive in their company culture, so yeah, that’s kind of the mission.
Matt Byrom:
That’s Perkbox in a nutshell.
Yoann Pavy:
In a nutshell, yeah.
Matt Byrom:
I read … Am I right in saying that Perkbox has 300,000 users?
Yoann Pavy:
A bit more, a bit more. We’re touching about half a million, actually, so the company was founded in 2015 by Saurav and Chieu, and in the last three years we grew from about four million to 15 to then 30 million turnover, so it’s growing very fast, only in the UK, across 10,000 companies across the UK, all sizes, so yeah, doing pretty good so far.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic, and tell me a bit about how the perks work. How does the relationship work between the business to the employee, and then the vendor or the person that’s actually giving the end discount or perk.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, so as soon as your company signs up, all employees would get access to the platform, and the platform has hundreds, not to say thousands, of offers, across discounts for all sorts of shopping and mobile insurance and health insurance and fitness, health stuff. Across your whole day-to-day, you would find perk to help you save money, and be happier and be more healthy, which is good, and on the other side obviously we have a very strong partnership team that would refresh perks on the weekly basis, and we have new deals all the time, and yeah, it’s pretty good. One of our more talked about perks are like free coffees at Café Nero and discounted cinema discounts from all the main cinemas in the UK, things like that, yeah.
Matt Byrom:
I guess it’s a win for everybody. You’re just connecting people who want to visit these retailers and the retailers that want the audience as well, so I guess everybody wins out of your platform, really. On your profile it says you built the performance marketing team from scratch. What did that entail, exactly?
Yoann Pavy:
The vision for the marketing team before I joined was to build a team in-house, have a fully function governance marketing team, so I joined in July last year, and basically started by recruiting the key members of the team to be able to tackle all the channels that we wanted to test, and really look into what has been done up until that point, looking at the analytics, what was existent in terms of reporting and stuff, and kind of shake things up, and kind of do it better.
The strong point for me and what was very interesting is that up until we joined, as the performance marketing team, the most of the budget, marketing budget, was spent on Facebook, which was really, really interesting for me for a B-to-B company, and that’s one of Chieu’s, so the co-founder, who is also the CMO, vision was that it’s really a B-to-B-to-C approach that we have in marketing. We’re really talking to the employees, trying to talk as much to the employees to then get referral to businesses to try our Perkbox.
So we have this duality in our ads, depending on the channel, where we would talk to decision-makers, and CEOs, and HR directors, but we would also talk to employees and generate interesting competition on social platform, and really engage with them to show what they have and show what they could have if they’re not with us already, and yeah, so the vision was really to take that base and kind of develop it based on the business and where the business is going, and run it with a fully function team.
Matt Byrom:
Is a lot of your marketing focused towards the employees of the business, who then speak with the business owner and say, “Can we be on Perkbox or can we get Perkbox for our business?”
Yoann Pavy:
It’s working very well. It’s working well, but it comes down to the base of who doesn’t want free stuff?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That’s true.
Yoann Pavy:
We’ve always been and we still are very eye candy in our approach on our ads on Facebook. There’s a lot of lollipops and ice cream and cupcakes, even though it’s just a image of what we sell, it’s not necessarily what you get. It’s not because you’re gonna give candies to your employees that they’ll be happier. They might be happy for one second, but then the routine comes back, so it’s more than that, but the vision and the messages around that works very well.
Matt Byrom:
A lot of the marketing’s direct to the employee. Do you find that the employees then speak with the business owners and actually … Is that a driving factor?
Yoann Pavy:
It was. It was in a much more grander scale before we kind of reshaped the digital marketing approach up to I would say last summer. We used to be very prominent on Facebook, as I said, so it was always very interesting approach, but we moved slightly away from it by bringing a bit more knowledge in the analytics side of things, and the reporting, and really looking at the pipeline we were creating, and obviously …
So the business has been very strong in SME space in the UK because of that, because people on Facebook and the size of the audiences that you can target, et cetera, is really broad. We kind of reshaped our approach to more channels, to really interesting things on LinkedIn, on Twitter as well, really accelerated Google AdWords, to really look for something more and create a better pipeline in the end with lower churn rate and just better business outcome. It was, and now it’s kind of different. Now we really have this dual approach where we would try and talk to decision-maker first, but always talk still to the employees and make sure they see the message as well.
Matt Byrom:
That makes sense, yeah, so I guess it’s a holistic marketing approach, not just different channels, but speaking to all the different audiences that are involved with buying your product as well and using your product.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
So what are the channels that are still most successful for you? Is it still really social that’s the key driver for user acquisition at Perkbox?
Yoann Pavy:
I call it the holy trinity at Perkbox, where we’re running mainly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google. LinkedIn became a very big part of our marketing strategy because of the sizes of the pipeline that we were creating, so we really changed the approach and moved from looking at only cost value to cost pipeline, if that makes sense, so pipeline created by pounds spent, which is much better. Also generate revenue that will have less churn rate in the end, so it really changed drastically in the past eight month, but those three channels are the biggest.
Matt Byrom:
When you say pipeline, is this pipeline that’s of one closed business, or is this actually pipeline of leads, potential business?
Yoann Pavy:
It’s quoted, so it’s potential revenue, so I guess that really depends to every one business and business model, but for us closed revenue can take time, obviously, because we’re talking about decision-makers, companies that have potentially hundreds of thousands of employees, and things implemented like that takes month. If we were to optimize our campaigns or content based on closed one, we would have to look back six months to a year, and that’s really hard to do. I guess the point is really you have to look at what is the most interesting point of conversions you wanna look at in your [inaudible 00:22:44] to really optimize your campaigns to [inaudible 00:22:46], for it to make sense, and that’s, yeah, that’s what we did.
Matt Byrom:
It’s really interesting that you look at the metric of pounds spent for pipeline generated, because I guess although in one sense, like you say, it can mean that you’ve got an instant view on are we generating more pipeline or less pipeline, it seems like it could be a very inaccurate metric in the fact that salespeople could just quote on lots of companies and lots of work, really, and that could just inflate the metric. How do you manage that?
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, so that’s where our qualification, and we have SDRs and SER teams and sales teams that really qualify the leads that come through, so we make sure that stuff that are quoted, leads that are quoted, are relevant, and after that we do look into conversion rate to close revenue, so we know if months on months or weeks on weeks, if things go up and down, if we have to worry, because you’re right, we could create a bigger pipeline that actually doesn’t close for some reason, and we love to see that and understand that, so we have a close eye on this, because yeah, no, I understand that just looking at it would be misleading, it’s just that for optimization purposes that I think for us it makes more sense.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting, really is, and what software tools are you using to actually track and manage that on a daily or weekly, monthly basis? What are the most important tools for you and your team?
Yoann Pavy:
Salesforce is central for the business, so everything is kind of mapped into Salesforce. We decided to add an extra layer for performance marketing on top of that. We’re using a tool called Bizible. I don’t know if you know about it.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Yoann Pavy:
It’s, yeah, allowing us to do click tracking against multichannel and multi-attribution, which is very interesting for us because it allows us to really look at the pipeline revenue created by channel, depending of a lead creation touch to an opportunity created, and everything in between. We are looking in a sense in the way our solution works because a lot of our leads actually come from clicks within 24 hours, and that’s also coming back from my Deliveroo experience.
Understanding post-click/post-view ratio, and how the post-view could influence a lead across your channel is less of an issue for us, whereas it was more of an issue at Deliveroo, where you would see some food on social media, and it could influence your compassion later on on Google, et cetera, and that was harder to understand and to map, so here with this solution, the Salesforce/Bizible combo, we managed to capture most of what we wanna see. The challenge now comes from introducing new channels that are more view-based, like programmatic and offline campaigns. Measuring incrementality when there is a lot of view, rather than actual clicks and UTM tags and stuff is harder, so we’re beginning to talk about it right now, to allow us to open new channels.
Matt Byrom:
It’s interesting you talk about attribution there. Like you say, it seems like Deliveroo, you’d be able to be emotionally influenced by a picture of some food, and actually perhaps click, and go ahead and actually order or buy straight away, maybe, but I guess with your system it seems, as you’ve indicated, that it seems like there’s a longer lead team, up to 12 months, perhaps, where people are making the decision there, and it’s pipeline for you, then. How are you dealing with attribution to actually really accurately track the original source, or where do you attribute the source to?
Yoann Pavy:
As I said, with Bizible, we will map all our touchpoints. It’s mainly UTM-based, but we would not only look at a first touch or last touch, we would look at different model in between to see differences and to see patterns, and then in terms of sales final up until closing deal, with will look at all the conversion rates in between from a lead to an opportunity created, and having a demo in between. We would look at that and the times in between as well, you know, like how long does it take from a lead to a demo with the sales team, how long does it take to be quoted and how long does it take to be closed, and we would look at this metrics. We’re making a lot of progress these days, this year, actually, on that, because that was not something that was necessarily a priority prior to this year, so I’m really excited about it. That’s gonna be very important for us in terms of scaling even more the business.
Matt Byrom:
It’s so interesting. I mean, so it’s such a difficult science, really, is to actually manage the user attribution and actually understand at which point to actually create that attribution and where people come from. It’s something that we struggle and consistently work with in our business as well. I guess another question that I had was it seems that you mention all the different channels and areas that you focus on. It seems that a lot of what your department is set up to do is actually to experiment ,and to test and to try new things, different marketing tactics in different areas. Would that be right?
Yoann Pavy:
Yes, so one of the most amazing thing here is that we really have a lot of freedom to do a lot of testing, and testing is really, really key for us. We do have our evergreen campaigns and strategy across our main channels, but always keen to look and to be kind of at the forefront of what’s new, so there’s a lot of testing in the pipeline for this year in terms of new channels, and for example we recently launch on Amazon as well, so the Amazon Network, which is becoming really increasingly huge.
Matt Byrom:
Is that on the paid advertising side of the Amazon Network?
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, on product searches and on actual Amazon, but also outside of Amazon, because they have some display activity outside of their main website. That’s the kind of thing that we’re testing, even though if it’s B-to-B we never have the assumption that it couldn’t work. We always have a testing mindset to see if we could get incrementality in the leads and the pipeline and the revenue that we could get out of these new tests. Yeah, definitely important.
Matt Byrom:
Which experiments in that case have been the most standout for you? Which experiments have you run over this last year that have given you the best return or have been a surprise for you in terms of how they’ve performed?
Yoann Pavy:
I’ll go back to LinkedIn, which was almost non-existent before I joined with a team, and looking at the metrics just slightly in a different way, basically going away from just looking at cost per lead point of view, and assuming that if the cost per lead increased doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, and going for quantity over quality doesn’t necessarily work forever, so that was our biggest win for sure, scaling up LinkedIn. We have this amazing relationship with LinkedIn now as well. They really help us get the most out of our activity, and the quality that we got out of that was really, really impressive. Overall, I think we managed to increase the pipeline we were creating on a monthly basis by reducing the volume of leads that were coming through by half, so really-
Matt Byrom:
Well, that’s cool.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, really, really impressive numbers, and when we sat down with the co-founders and showed them, that was kind of a revelation, you know? Like, oh, we’ve been going after Facebook for so long, and thought it was kind of the only way, and showing them that it’s okay to spend more on the more expensive channel if that backs up metrics that are just further down the line was really important for us in the past eight month.
Matt Byrom:
What types of advertising are working best for you on LinkedIn?
Yoann Pavy:
We try a bit of everything that’s available to us. The text ad, which are not the most common ones. We do sponsored content, sponsored ads, and display, which comes from DSP, from programmatic, to really make sure. Really the key is to be aware our audience is and where decision-makers are. Anywhere that they would be, we will try it and see if it works, and LinkedIn was definitely a win for that.
Matt Byrom:
To take a slight departure, it sounds like a lot of what we’ve been talking about has been advertising-based, sort of paid advertising. How important is that content inbound, organic advertising, you know, SEO, how important is that side of things for you?
Yoann Pavy:
Very important, very important, and so at the same time as we scaled performance marketing team, we also scaled our [inaudible 00:32:07] content and creative team to go alongside and go towards the same goal, so we really at the same time ramped up our contents and pushed that content where it works, going into nurturing flows and really being smarter with our emailing strategy, nurturing leads down the funnel and qualifying them. That was a big change for us as well in the last year. That as well as on the creative side, so we also have an in-house creative team that fully support digital and content, so that’s really important for us as well.
Matt Byrom:
So you’ve really just scaled the whole marketing team all at once, really, I guess. A big year for Perkbox, eh?
Yoann Pavy:
Big, yeah, yeah, yeah. Big, big.
Matt Byrom:
Right, it seems if you’re growing to the quoted numbers that I saw of 300,000 to half a million, and I guess you’ve probably got a big goal of a million coming not too far down the line, I imagine, so it seems like you’ve got a lot of growth ahead. Do you guys plan to branch out into other countries as well.
Yoann Pavy:
Nothing specific at the moment, but yeah, that would be great. I mean, for me personally, I can say that it would be amazing to kind of live again where I live at Deliveroo one more time, and hopefully many more times in the future. It would be great. From a digital point of view, and all the things you can do when you talk about different markets and different strategy, and it would be great, yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Last question, really, before we jump into our last five quickfire questions is what’s the focus for you for the rest of this year and 2019? What strategies are you going to be doubling down on?
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, so keep diversifying channels and keep testing new channels, I think. Also with content, trying to find the right balance in how much could we squeeze out of content to generate more business for us rather than going for pure ads. That’s gonna be a focus, and I would say being more customer-centric as well on the website and the way we generate leads. I’ve actually really loved the [inaudible 00:34:22] that you did with [Geon 00:34:23] from Drift. That kind of validated a lot of things that we were talking about internally, and that’s gonna be a focus for us this year.
I always think in the back of my head that landing pages are dead with things I’ve seen on Facebook and LinkedIn and even Twitter, when you can generate leads directly on-platform. I think it would be very, very strong for businesses to start doing that on their website directly, you know, and have a real discussion, a one-to-one discussion that comes with a chat bot or actual people to qualify more leads. That’s gonna be very, very interesting, and I would say one last thing would be to keep testing offline, so we never done a lot of offline at Perkbox before, but this year we tried a tube campaign which was a good test for us to work as a team on that, and I think there’s more coming up on this. More on the brand awareness side of things, but I think it’s important, to outside of the governance side of things, to also kind of be there and be at the forefront of people’s mind, and who we are.
Matt Byrom:
It’s interesting that you’re going to look at some offline things, but are particularly also interested in the chat bot side of things as well. I think there’s still quite a lot of work to do in that area to really refine it and make the bots actually effective and useful, but I really think there’s a big future in the automated chat, following through to actually then passing leads and people onto salespeople when they’re qualified or when they meet certain criteria, so I think it’s really exciting. It’s something that we’ve been experimenting with a bit ourselves as well recently.
Yoann Pavy:
Cool.
Matt Byrom:
I’d love to take this to our last five questions, which are five quickfire questions, so question number one is what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Yoann Pavy:
I would say question everything. That’s kind of my motto. I think it’s very easy to have too much subjectivity in marketing teams and in businesses in general, like thinking things are not gonna work or we should change things for certain subjective reasons. I think everything should be tested before giving any conclusions.
Matt Byrom:
That’s very good. I agree. Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah, so I don’t read a lot of books, but one that I read recently was by Adam Alter, called Irresistible. It was really cool because he talks about the rise of addiction in tech, and businesses that are keeping us hooked, like Instagram and stuff, and I recently had a first child, so me and my wife are definitely very interested in that, and should we have a tablet and should we have … You know, should kids have phones too early, et cetera, and the addiction bit of technology these days and digital is very interesting, but also I think a problem, so an interesting book.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it’s a big shift, really, at the moment, isn’t it, where we’ve got phones, and tablets, and these social networks and things that enable us to connect and communicate so easily. I mean, I can remember when we didn’t even have mobile phones or it was a luxury to have 20 texts a month.
Yoann Pavy:
I get you. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, so number three is what software tool could you not live without?
Yoann Pavy:
From my background, I would probably say Facebook Business Manager, just by my background, but nowadays I would probably say Salesforce because everything sits there, in terms of the business data, and that’s where we kind of pull the data to do analysis. If you ask me again in about one month, I’ll probably change my mind and tell you something else, like Mixpanel or something like that, but we’re really getting up to speed in analytics, so probably another analytics tool.
Matt Byrom:
What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Yoann Pavy:
Very interesting question. I thought about it quite a lot, and I think probably anything that Kanye West pulls off.
Matt Byrom:
Even though they might not mean to be marketing campaigns.
Yoann Pavy:
Exactly, exactly. I’m always fascinated by the way him and even Kim Kardashian run their personal marketing campaigns. It’s really fascinating, and even recently Kanye West going back on Twitter just because of his new album dropping in two months. It’s not random. It just shows that every advertising effort should be integrated to work together, to work collectively, to increase impact, and I think that’s what he’s really good at.
Matt Byrom:
I suppose it shows as well that bad advertising can be good as well, because some of the things that they do can be very controversial and things like that, but it just gets the message out to a wider audience, you know, that controversy just spreads like wildfire, doesn’t it?
Yoann Pavy:
Definitely.
Matt Byrom:
Really interesting.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Finally, which other podcasts do you listen to?
Yoann Pavy:
I recently got into podcasts. I’m on one right now, so two actually that I’m listening to these days. One from Dylan Hey called The Social Media Growth Show, which has just started, I think, and it’s a very, very interesting one, more around the social media side of things, and the other one that I just got into is from Hotjar, actually. It’s called The Humans Strike Back, and interesting content there as well for everything marketing-related.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool.
Yoann Pavy:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
I’ll put links to both of those in the show notes, so anything that we’ve talked about there in the last five will all be in the show notes, linked up, so people can check out the books and the podcasts, and the software tools as well. Yoann, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. It’s been really interesting. Very, very interesting past that you’ve got, and it sounds like you’ve got an exciting thing going on there at Perkbox, so it’s been really interesting. I hope the listeners have got a lot from this today, and thank you very much for your time.
Yoann Pavy:
Thank you very much, Matt, for inviting me. I think it’s been interesting for me as well. Very interesting.
