Mastering and scaling eComm PPC growth channels — Adam Sidney // Myles Apparel

Quotes

• “I think we didn’t do any kind of performance marketing until around 2017 and then ramped it up significantly in 2018. It’s hard to find a marketing channel that is as good in terms of being able to tell if it’s working as Instagram, Facebook, and Google.” -Adam“Instagram, because of the nature of the experience is very visual, it’s a must-have for brands. We see it as a key way to express our visual identity and a lot of our written identity to the world.” -Adam “We think about identity as a mix of trying to be more lifestyle-focused versus more product-focused. It’s tough to get to this point but I think ofit as the Beatles song, ‘the more love you give the more you get’.” -Adam “It hasn’t been that over-fashioned, inaccessible looking brand but I think it’s still attractive and makes people feel that they can relate.” -Adam“I’ve heard stories like this is the first activewear brand that didn’t make me feel awful about my own exercise patterns. It’s important to strike the right balance between that sentiment and then also we have a lot of customers who are like, I get up every morning at 4 am and liftweights.” -Adam“We love paid Instagram but obviously it only gets more expensive and is essentially a rent-free commerce company now. Your organic social is still relatively free compared to ads.” -Adam“As we think about organic social, we’ve done things like analyzing which images and captions have done the best. We may find a correlation there, between things as random such as warm color vs. a cool color in the tone of the overall photo.” -Adam“Right now, we go back and forth into what the universe has to offer in terms of performance versus just nailing the product, the story, and the Instagram ad. I blend that philosophy with trying other new things such as looking at catalogs.” -Adam“I think sometimes we also have to keep discipline around what we do because it’s going to work versus what we do because we like the way it looks or it feels like kind of brand-enhancing but it’s really hard to measure.” -Adam“Instagram and Facebook are absolutely table steaks but then you get into a point of diminishing return and the ceiling is very high on these platforms but eventually you run out of look-alike audiences and hit maturity of a channel. It happens for all brands and that’s where early investment in organic growth channels really pays dividends.” -Ben“For me, as a CEO, it’s constantly a dance of immediate gratification for sales versus laying the groundwork. There are also other examples like affiliate marketing, SEO, getting click backs and developing relationships with the affiliates. Sometimes those things have a time 6 to 12 months time frame before they start to return and sometimes they have a high barrier to entry in terms of the cost.” -Adam“The devil is in the details when it comes down to making that decision of near-term vs short-term and a lot of that has to do with how you’re evaluating your business.” -Ben