Beyond the Basics: Sam Piliero's Performance Marketing Playbook

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This is the story of the one as the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering, so her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com or just stop by Ranger for the ones who get it done.

Number one thing I see with brands that come to us is they're overspending on their existing and engaged customers, so they don't have their audience segment set up or they don't have proper prospecting, retargeting and retention set up in their account. I'm not talking top, middle, bottom. Top, Middle, bottom insinuates that we're trying to lead a consumer down a funnel. That's not the case. We're just trying to say, hey, all the people that we've never targeted before, let's target those people. All the people that have purchased from us before, let's target those people.

Step into the world of success with your brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I realized that before I keep talking about pets from Sam's previous job at Bark, which I am a big fan of, that I needed to start the interview so we don't take up all the time talking about our beloved animals. So, Sam Piliero, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. What you do in performance marketing is something that really is a skill set and especially with everything that's changing. I know you have some great strategies, tactics, things that you've tested, because everything I teach in digital content at USC now has to revolve around, well, how is AI affecting this? Or what part has AI been helping with that we haven't even realized. And how much further can we go and still keep. You know, people are concerned about keeping brand authenticity and being true and credible, but also understanding how to use AI correctly. So your agency now is the Moonlighters, your direct response advertising agency. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how you got into performance marketing. Was that something you were always interested in?

Yeah. So first off, thank you for having me. I appreciate the intro. Yeah, I'll get us back to the start. I won't take too long on this, although I am a man of long rants, so stop me anytime. But, but really here I kind of started. I really was always like doing some sort of business thing from the time I was really, really young, like lemonade stands, like trading cards, like I have like still like my Pokemon cards when I was like seven or something. And that obviously evolves. And I started in at the end of high school, going into college, my first Shopify store. So this was like really, really early days of Shopify, I believe the first year of Shopify's like E Commerce release. And I was just doing some classic drop shipping like a lot of people. And I ran my first Facebook ad and I was spending something like five or ten bucks a day. And, and I don't think I'll ever forget the first sale I got. I was selling a like sleeping blanket, camper blanket thing, weird product. Made like 20 bucks on the first sale. And hearing that Shopify like Cha Ching for the first time was like the dopamine just sent through my body. And one thing led to the next where after around four years of running that store, I sold it. And then I started a full time job after graduating college at VaynerMedia, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk's agency. And I got a crash course there.

Yeah, sure.

I think that, that a lot of people expect that and it is true. Like the culture that you would expect to be at VaynerMedia is @VaynerMedia. And while I was there I had this amazing opportunity to work with the E Commerce team. Specifically it was the start of what's now Vayner Commerce. It was four or five of us, I believe at the time. I, I think it's probably a team of like 60 or 70 now. But it was so early days and we got to work on brands like Liquid iv, Supergoop and quite a few more. And it was like I didn't know what I was doing really. Let's be totally honest. I was trying to figure it out and eventually decided my time there was. Was spent. And I decided to take a leap to Bark, which you just mentioned. When I started up Bark, we were doing about 150 to 180 million in revenue. They were a private company at the time, and when I left, they were publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. And I was obviously great timing, not gonna pretend I was the only factor involved. This is a massive company that did a lot of great things, but for sure contributed and learned a lot. Really got like this massive crash in what I would say is like six years in marketing, plus the four before running my own ads. Had got to see both sides of the spectrum here. And that's kind of what led to the start of the Moonlighters. I was literally moonlighting on the side and worked on three or four clients that thankfully to the boss of Gary Vaynerchuk said, yeah, you can go to take those clients whenever you want. And then we grew when I went full time, went in on it, and thankfully, it's been super successful so far. And I try to educate as much as I can with what I've done.

Fantastic. It's funny because I've had Sabir Summer Kant on my show.

You hired me.

Yeah, okay. I was going to say, I'm sure you worked with him, so that's fantastic. And what a great story. Just testing things out for yourself first. Realizing this is something you can actually do for a living. Finding the right opportunities or being right place, right time, right opportunity. I can't even imagine everything that you learned at Vanderjuk Media and then being able to apply that to another company and then being able to go out on your own that's such. You don't hear very many linear, you know, trajectories these days.

I am pretty dialed in when it comes to that sort of thing. You know, I. For. For a lot of people that see some of the success and, oh, your business is growing, like, things are working out, whatever. A lot of people I think, naturally see and they're like, wow, it just happened real quickly. You know, you hear, like, the overnight success that takes 10 years. And it truly was like that for me. So all those years of time at VaynerMedia, time at BarkBox, you know, total of like around six years, roughly. I was still living at home. I was taking the train every day into New York City about an hour back and forth. That time on the train was spent doing the other work. I'd get home around 6. I'd work out. I'd have Dinner with my family, and I'd work from about 7 o' clock to 11 o' clock at night on other stuff. And it was a grind for some years, but I was very aware that this was the best time to do it. Right. I was super aware of that. And because of that, I think I get to pay a little bit more dividend. It's paying dividends now, and I get to be a little bit more flexible today. That was the only way I could crash it into a short period of time.

Yeah, well, absolutely. And you made smart choices. You didn't just go out because a lot of people want. They're like, all right, first I need to get independence. I need to go spend a lot of money in my own place, get the flashy car, all of those things. But you really did the grind. But you made smart decisions so that you had capital to invest in your own company, capital to move on and get the place that you wanted later. And all of those other things that we think about in life.

Not gonna pretend it was always exactly like that. But, you know, there was one catalyst of this, which was mostly unfortunate for most people, but with COVID it kind of pulled back any sort of plans of, like, moving out, doing any sort of change. So I was kind of just hunkered down home for a longer period of time. And, you know, once that period was over. Yeah, you're right. Like, there was more savings than I originally anticipated. There was more capital to deploy into a business, and it was, for me, really good time. And I don't mean to say that in the wrong way.

Yeah, funnily enough, I was just telling my boyfriend a couple days ago, I almost missed that time when we just were hunkered down and we could really focus on our relationships and on our work. And it was a very different time. And it wasn't great for a lot of people, but for some of us, it created epiphanies and helped us do the grind 100%. So let's talk about ads. What is something that surprisingly easy that you would say about performance marketing? And what's something that is really difficult, maybe to most people, not to yourself?

Okay, so I think that the biggest. Well, I'll frame this in a unique way here. Like, when you think about someone that jumps into the ads manager. I saw this reel the other day on Instagram, and you jump into ads Manager for the first time, or even if you've been in there and maybe took a break for a year, it's like going into a cockpit of A pilot and you're trying to like, figure out how to fly the plane. It's extremely confusing. It's super overwhelming. And even if you've been doing it for a year or two or three, you're probably still not familiar with all the gadgets. And there's a very fine line between who, what actually needs to be pulled, what levers you need to pull, what gadgets, as I say, need to be used versus what is actually going to move the needle forward. So the thing that I would say is the hardest part for a lot of people that are running paid advertising is really paid advertising in general, is what can you do at a bare minimum to get the biggest result. And a lot of people get caught up in very tactical small things. All right, so the easy part is actually the flip side. The easy part that I would say for me and for someone who's just been doing this for a while, is you've seen the landscape evolve, you've understood, you've taken inventory of what the most important things are, Right? So like, very easy for me to understand that. And for many people that are running paid ads for a long time, very easy to understand that as long as you stick with a system that you believe is most applicable to your business, you upload creatives most as. As frequently as you possibly can. You take. You apply what I would call like a 70, 2010 rule. 70% of your creative bandwidth goes to the best performing ads anyway. 20% goes to iterations or adjacent ads. 10% goes to knock out of the park home runs. I saw some funny idea. I think that'd be cool. As long as you kind of are feeding the system, using the most basic functions of the system and not getting too messy. That's like your foot in the door to actually like doing something right. In Facebook ads and Google Ads in these platforms, there's a lot that can go wrong. But that's what I would say if I was like the easiest and the toughest thing, truly.

Yeah, and that's such a good point. I love that you're talking about the changing landscape because it is hard to keep up with what algorithmic changes have happened on any one given platform. And I was reading something recently that Facebook is in general for organic content, trying to go back to more of what it was in the beginning. So maybe a little bit less business content, more senior friends and family, the things that people really want to do on Facebook. But I also know so many people who use Facebook really well for networking and for their businesses now. I'VE heard recently Instagram really is still pushing more video first content and not as much other content. But I think that doesn't always, as business owners help us translate. Okay, we have this information, but what exactly is going to be that secret sauce? So what are some of the things or what's the method that you use to help your clients maneuver through this landscape and get the best roi?

It's a great question. We use something that we call the M3 method. It's my fancy way of saying it's a three step process. Basically the really simple version of this method which we have like documentation that's really long. I don't know if I could say it, but we could share it to your audience completely for free. Essentially it starts with making sure that you're spending money in the right place at the right time. So that's like the fundamental, most important thing to do. So that's looking at all the platforms that you're running. Where should you be spending more across those platforms based on the incremental return on ad spend or cost per acquisition? Whatever your KPI is, the way that I think about all media is it's just the media buyer's job or the growth director's job to siphon the cash to the best possible ROI position. So if you were running Snapchat ads and you were getting a 10x return on ad spend, obviously making up numbers, and on Facebook you were getting a four, then you better believe you should be smashing Snapchat as much as you possibly can. Most of the time that's not the case with Snap. Most of the time it's Facebook and Google. And when I say Facebook, I mean meta for the most part. Really after we get through that distribution, the next piece of that distribution is what I call swim lanes. So Facebook kind of went on this roller coaster in the last, I'd say 10 years. It was really, really modular, really granular. About 10 years ago, roughly like 2015, you would set up very classic top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel campaigns. And then somewhere along the way, right around 2019, it started to push more like consolidation. And then for Facebook advertisers, everyone remembers like the advantage plus push post iOS 14.5. I can get a little technical, but essentially they just said, hey, Advantage plus campaigns are one campaign, one ad set. Throw all your ads in there and that's what's going to work the best. And they pushed and pushed and pushed and most advertisers that were serious noticed that that doesn't work as well, they noticed that there was issues with that, and Facebook has stepped back on that. So we've seen Facebook remove themselves from Advantage Plus. Advantage plus no longer exists in its 2020 form. There's audience that are Advantage Plus. You could argue on that a little bit. But the one campaign, one ad set, all your ads in one place, it's not a thing anymore. You can create multiple ad sets in an Advantage plus, whatever. So what we've seen is a shift to more complexity. And because of that, it's really, really important that we have proper swim lanes in ad accounts. And the number one thing I see and I bring this up, it's such an important part, is we audit accounts every single day here. Number one thing I see with brands that come to us is they're overspending on their existing and engaged customers, so they don't have their audience segments set up or they don't have proper prospecting, retargeting and retention set up in their account. I'm not talking top, middle, bottom. Top, middle, bottom insinuates that we're trying to lead a consumer down a funnel. That's not the case. We're just trying to say, hey, all the people that we've never targeted before, let's target those people. All the people that have purchased from us before, let's target those people. That's been super important to us. And that's kind of the full phase one. Phase two is when we dig into, like, everything from, like, gender, age, location, we get really, really deep on, like, time of day, day of week. I'll share a story that I love to share because I think it's so relevant. We mentioned Barkbox at the beginning, right when I started at Barkbox, Monday through Friday, we'd have kind of week days. We were just hitting our cost per acquisition goal. And every Monday morning, I'd walk in, address the team, and be like, guys, great Monday. Or great weekend, great weekend, great weekend. And what I recognized after probably like embarrassingly like two to three months was that, oh, the weekends are better than the weekdays. So I can't say the exact numbers, but we started to spend more money on the weekends. And that was really successful for that business at that time. Don't know if it still is. I don't manage the account anymore. But at the time, it was very successful. And that was a light bulb moment for me that made me realize that if you ask anyone running ads in 2012, 13, 14, 15, they'd always say, of course we, we spend more on our better Days we, we do more business on Monday through Wednesday. So we up our budgets on those days. Something shifted where Facebook says every day you spend your same amount of money, the learning phase people get freaked out about. Right. So we want to actually make sure again to the main point, as a director of media, you really want to switch your budget and or move your budget to wherever it's going to drive the highest roi. And the final, final step of our process, what I would say is M3 is we want to put cost controls around it. Cost caps, bid caps, target ROIs, target CPAs, we want to be very restrictive on those because instead of the target being the variable, which is what's typical, so you say I want to spend $1,000 a day and my ROAS changes or your CPA changes every day. Now we're saying actually spend is variable, target is flat. So we set a target cost per acquisition of a hundred bucks making up numbers and that stays within that hundred dollar range every single day. Spend goes down when it can't hit it, spend goes up when it's above its threshold. So that to me is the most important thing when we're really scaling hard, like we're talking like tens of thousands of dollars per day. But early days like everything from M1 and M2 totally apply. That's how we do it. That's our rundown.

This is the story of the 1. As the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering, so her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

Well. And yeah, I want to dig into that further because, well, you mentioned the testing period. So I've heard, you know, and I want to get your opinion on this because I've heard Otis spend a little bit of money every day for 30 days on Meta, maybe Facebook specifically. And then that way the algorithm kind of figure out who is your audience and who to best serve things to. Is that a fair amount of time for most brands?

So I think like if you're just starting out today, I think you should just throw all your ads into one campaign and one ad set and just let it rip. Something that we've seen a little bit of that for brands that just start out is just run Some interest audiences to guide the algorithm little bit closer. Right. Like if you're selling shoes like, just like throw like Adidas in there or Nike in there, some other shoe brand that's not as big as Nike. Just to guide it a little bit, I would generally say like a two week period should be long enough for most. It just depends on what you're spending. If you're spending 10 bucks a day, you're going to have to wait a long, long, long time. If you're spending 500 bucks a day, you could probably get your results in really like couple days. I don't think the algorithm needs time to learn. I think it needs impressions to learn.

Nice. Yeah, that's a really good distinction. And then the other thing, of course the platforms want to, they have this narrative, right? You just put in your creative, maybe you put your ideal customer Persona profile and then tell us how much you want to spend and we'll manage it for you and we'll find the right audiences.

I'll happily react to that.

Yeah, please.

Yeah. I mean like if that was true, I wouldn't be in business. If that was true, no one would watch the videos that I put out. No one would comment saying that they implemented something and things got better. If that was true, Facebook wouldn't invite me to events to talk about strategy. There would be no strategy. And in fact a great tidbit of this to actually instead of me just saying random claims. Facebook, in their most recent panel, their summit that they did over the summer very clearly stated that the media buyer agencies and consultants are going nowhere. Right. They are an integral part of their system. It was the leading statement that they made for the entire summit. It's amazing online everyone could go view it by meta themselves. That to me is a very clear indication that although they want AI to do things, I don't believe AI is going to take over the growth director or media buyer's job because really like the way that I view someone who's buying media is not just someone who's like plugging in and throwing some ads in an account. That person is integrating very closely with the finances of the business to understand can we make more profit for the brand. What trends are hot, what's changing? Right. Really the job of the media buyer, I think a lot of people confuse, they think it's a job where you're just uploading assets and putting it into some system. When really the job of the media buyer is analyzing the creative, analyzing the business, finding the crossover, understanding and having a pulse on Trends and what's working across other businesses, which is the agency advantage. And then plopping that into the ads manager, the plopping into ads manager, the ad uploads. That's the part that my whole team, we dream about that part because that's the part that's, that's, that's the easiest part of the day. Right.

Wow. And same thing for Google.

A hundred percent. Yeah. I use Facebook as a lander here a lot of the times just because most people understand it a little bit better. But 1000, 1000% Google didn't say anything. I haven't been doing Google Summit as I speak about, but I would imagine it's not going to go too far because agencies and consultants and media buyers drive dollars for these businesses. Mm.

You talked about AI a little bit, so I have to bring that up. You have some great videos on your website, themoonlighters.com you have all kinds of videos that share everything from discovery calls to a lot of content about Facebook ads, campaigns, ways to make your ads more profitable. Nano Banana. So I would love to hear a little bit about your perspective on best use cases for AI. I think I was reading a statistic that said like 57% of all content now has a little bit of AI, whether it's the images or whether it's some of the copy content or whatever, or whether it's a scheduling tool or whatever the case may be.

Sure. I think when it comes to, well, well, there's like two distinctions of AI when it comes to advertising. There's the platform's use of AI to target better to show more relevant ads to people.

Machine learning aspect.

Machine learning, exactly. Like the mega white papers that Facebook and Google release that are hard to understand. And then there's the use of AI that I think is more relevant to probably everyone, including myself, which is like images, videos, et cetera. Machine learning wise. My statement on this is like it's going to be Facebook so far ahead. Google's so far ahead that any sort of catch up to that is extremely challenging. Extremely challenging. Doesn't even have to do with the data. It has to do with the sentiment of that data and the analysis of it, which takes a long time, no matter how great your AI analysis is. But what's the most important part of this when it comes to actual AI for, for medium small businesses, you can multiply your creative output like never before. Period. End of story. You could basically take what would once take you multiple photo shoots. And as long as you have the rights to Use, especially when you're dealing with like talented models and such, you could just multiply your business very quickly. What I mean by that is let's just say you have a picture of someone holding your product and there's a headline on the product, right? There's a headline on the image. You could then take that exact model, that exact product, everything and just change the environment or change what the person is physically doing with the product. And the way that basically Nanobanana 3 or the Pro version of it works nowadays is it's really able to take the exact product field dimensions like use case and multiply for you. I don't really know how else to say. It's just so. It's never been this easy. Everyone could do it. The landscape is essentially flat and not to mention like that's just images. Talk about video. Like there's. I don't know if anyone's watching TV these days, like regular daytime tv, but like half the ads are AI right now. Like Sora is everywhere. I mean Coca Cola just had a 30 second run, pure AI.

They're holiday new holiday ad, right?

Yeah, 100%. And one of the Amazon ads is generated like it says on the bottom, like generated with some AI, right, like all there, there is a big push and you can even see there's some crappy AI out there on like real time television. So I think that we could really like the playing field is even. I'll say that the playing field's never been this even.

And as a performance marketer I imagine that can also help you save cost. You don't have to have as much of a creative team, perhaps a ton.

Yeah. So it's actually less like you still need someone to know how to use the tool very, very well. But the way that I think about this is you have like a small business or a medium business, let's say a one to $10 million revenue business that would be considered technically small to medium. If you're in that range, you have a boatload of costs to your business. But you're still trying to make things work. You're not out of the woods. It's usually a messy middle part of a business. So you look to all your expenses and one of the biggest expenses at this stage is creative development. So instead of spending a hundred thousand dollars to get the first photo shoot and then make iterations of the second and then so on, you could generally just book one photo shoot, get the rights to use for those models or photography and multiply across the board to Then share out again. Everyone still gets their cut, but there's not as many people having to do the same thing over and over and over again. Coordinating talent, doing all that stuff. Yeah, it's, it's changing. It still needs to happen once. And then I think the thing that I love so much about this is the big business can do this with the very minuscule hit to their overall budget. Right. The multi million, the $100 million business. When they think about a creative photo shoot for $20,000, they think, cool, this is less than 1% of our total ad budget. Who cares? But when I say, hey, you can get the same photo shoot for $20,000 to another business, they're like, well, we can't even run 300 assets, so what are we going to, how could we even use this effectively? And the discount, just like anything, when you buy bulk in anything, you're getting a bigger, better discount because there's efficiencies, economies of scale, classic stuff. Right. So I think this is the most level playing field. Again, it's very important to recognize that there won't be a time like this for most advertisers probably for a long time. There will be eventually, but. For a long time.

Wow. Yeah. That's one of the things you have to get over the hurdles of learning how to use new tech. But once you know how to use it, 100% efficiencies. And for those smaller businesses, maybe micro businesses, because they don't quite fit into that 1 million plus area, they tend to not have a lot of money. Right. They don't have a lot of investment. They're bootstrapped. It's an area that's so necessary getting out advertising, making sure people understand and know your product and where you fit in the market. But the expenses can really add up.

So for sure. And I would say use it, use it, use it, but don't devalue yourself and your product. Consumers are not going to care as much if you're using AI as long as the value of the product matches. Right. So you don't ever want to show like, for example, you could use technically AI to show like a weight loss result. That's not real. That's a. I use that example because everyone could understand it quickly, like that's not a good use of AI. What a good use of AI, of course, is if there was a real result. Maybe let's go with weight loss again. If there was a real result and you just wanted to show the actual pictures of that person, like spruced up or something like in. I don't know. The more important part is that we're not overselling anything and therefore trading the value trade doesn't make sense. Then you lose trust completely.

Yeah, absolutely. And what about AI disclosures?

No idea.

Yeah. Should people just. I mean I'm hearing that the different platforms are wanting you to disclose when you're using AI that there's more consumer trust when you say that. But I think when I go to social media, I see a lot of things that I'm like, that has to be AI, but there's no disclosure.

Well, yes, of course, that's, that's for sure the case. Yeah. I don't know too much about like the disclosures that are needed on, on every platform. But like we comply where it's. Where it's necessary to comply. I think it depends too like what the definition of AI is. Very challenging too. Right. Like if you had like if you had a picture of me or something and I had this hat on, but we used AI to put an overlay on it and get rid of the fuzz that I have in certain spots. Like, is that AI? You know, it's a little tricky. That's editing. It's a balance. But I know what you mean. I'll just say to everyone, like, don't try to hide stuff from these platforms. They'll find you out. Yeah.

When you're talking about Google Ads, are you including YouTube in that? Because I know Facebook and Google are two of your favorite.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And what is something you see people get wrong on YouTube ads? Because I mean, I mean full disclosure, that's not an area focused on as a podcaster because we tend to see people who perform really well with their podcast or video cast. Podcast on YouTube Don't. Doesn't necessarily translate to audio and vice versa. But that is an area of growth that I'm interested in working on next year. So what are some things that you would say for somebody who does not have a big subscriber? Has not really focused of any kind of brand. Right. Not just my podcast. What should they do to focus? Yeah.

YouTube paid or YouTube organic?

Both.

Sure. Paid. First, since we've been on that topic, make sure that there's a clear distinction between placements, shorts versus longs. So curate content specifically for shorts. Don't try to use that in the shorts placement. It doesn't work. No one clicks on a seven minute ad that's in a landscape, but it actually is being displayed on a short. It makes no sense to people. It's such an easy skip. On the flip side, when you're in a non skippable format or at least a five second skip through format then yes, go ahead and sell like you have the Viewers attention for 5 seconds or longer depending on the placement. I would generally just like as long as you're treating each of those separately, not even comparing those metrics. Cause they're essentially different platforms. Right. One is a shorts medium. That's a very different user than someone who's sitting down to watch a long. That's what I'd say on the paid side. That's my biggest piece of advice. There's so much that goes into it depending on like the brand, the category. Right. There's a lot on the organic side. I could only speak from experience. I don't know what works for other people. We've had a lot of success in just giving away all the secrets possible. So like I just try to talk as openly and honestly as I can. I share as many case studies as I possibly can break down really what we did because for me I think it's quite simple. The implementation of certain things is very challenging. Your brain getting dopamine hits from watching really cool tactics and results is fun for a lot of people. But the execution, implementation, the behind the scenes work, it just takes hours and hours and hours and hours of hard work. And there's a reason that a lot of people come to work with us or they decide no, I think I know how to do it your way. And the people that come to work with us often will say oh I tried to do it the way that you're teaching and it didn't work exactly how I wanted to. Then they work with us and they get the over that, that hump sometimes it's just a lot of work.

Yeah.

This is the story of the 1. As the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she part partners with Grainger for auto reordering. So her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

I think people really underestimate the amount of work, things and time and you know, energy when as business owners they should probably be focusing on other parts of their business.

Or I could talk about this all day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for your business. I mean, you obviously already had some clients. Did you use organic and performance marketing to continue to increase? Was it mostly word of mouth?

All of it. So we, I, I stacked four clients only. And when I, when we had four clients, it was just people that I knew from my network. That was nice. Like I was making money. All was good. That's when I quit Barkbox. It was just like time to give this a shot. And along the way, we went from 4 to 16 to 40 to coming up on a hundred now. And that growth happened from a few different ways. First, we run ads. So like, that's always a staple from my side. If you're signing up with an advertising agency, they're not running ads. It's like, what is going on? Like, why, what is happening? Why don't they know how to run their own ads successfully? Second thing is, as I already mentioned, organic social has been tremendous for us. And that's only possible because we do good work. Right? So it's literally not possible if we're trying to start from, from zero over here. I have tons of wins and real results that we're able to share and that goes a long way. Word of mouth referrals, big part of our business again, thankfully, because most of our customers are happy and respect the work that we do. And yeah, that's kind of been the formula on my side. Just keep it really simple. We don't sell too hard. And I'd say the biggest thing, if I had to give like one secret away to everyone for an agency model, of course, I made the decision about three years ago to hire exclusively senior level. I was not doing this previously. We hired some junior talent and I realized that I had to really micromanage that talent and really be on top of people. So we took a totally different direction. We pay everyone probably about two and a half times what those junior members were getting paid. At first I was like, this is going to be terrible for me. And then I quickly realized that, oh, I don't have headaches anymore. And like, there's a lot that can actually be done. And we're growing businesses better. So clients are staying. Our churn rates dropped to like two and a half, three percent. And that's something that the client can't pay for. That level of talent elsewhere you can't find. I mean, I can name people on my team, but you can't find some people on our team anywhere near the price that you have to pay us as an agency. So that would be my biggest, I'M not trying to sell us too hard here, but, like, that would be my biggest tip for really any business owner. But especially if you have multiple people on your team, you're growing, just pay up. It's worth every penny.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a, that's a really, really interesting point because so many times when you're starting out, you want to not have a lot of overhead. Right. But if you're. You're saying if you hire one senior person that can replace probably three to five junior people in terms of what they know, how fast, and so it's, it's worth it. And I noticed that you do have team members in Canada and the U.S. many of us have team members spread throughout the world these days, whether it's people who are being digital nomads who, you know, cut their teeth in the United States working at big companies or whatever the case may be. So can you talk about that strategy?

Yeah, that comes with like every. Every single person on our team, except for basically myself, our director of operations, and one gentleman who does a lot of, like, reporting needs everyone's client facing. So they spend probably 50% of their time literally just talking to clients. And because of that, it's critical that everyone's on top of their game. So we made the call on our side again right around that same time. U.S. and Canada, for the most part, is what we hire, like two guys over in the uk. My guy who does sales is in the UK as well. Like, it's really just like, can we get people that are most similar to the people that we work with? Right. If we worked with a bunch of people and in different countries, then we would hire people in those countries that are most understanding of those markets. If you're selling in the U.S. if you're selling in Canada, you better know the U.S. and Canadian markets very well. Yeah, same goes to EU, you know.

Interesting. Well, that, that's a really good point because there are nuances and there are differences in the way. I was just in Vietnam meeting with different businesses and the way that people market or that they need to market and the way that consumers purchase is very different in many cases. So you have to have that understanding. I wanted to ask who your ideal customer is, because you, you work with E Commerce, but that can mean a lot of things. So do you work with coaches and consultants and people have online courses, or is it more physical products?

I save this for the end for you. This is a. Depending on the timing of this release, works really well. I'll be honest with you, Annika. So we have two sides to this. Our main ideal customer, people that we work with, other moonlighters. The main thing that we focus on, it's roughly a one to $10 million E commerce business lead, gen 2, mostly E commerce. Really. If you're spending 20, 30 plus thousand dollars in media all the way up to multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, that's our wheelhouse, that's our bread and butter. However, there's a ton of demand for everyone else and I recognize that it's really hard to get to a million bucks. We just reopened the doors to school.com Facebook. It is full community for Facebook ads. I don't even know the pricing to be honest, as of today. But it's extremely affordable compared to what we put together on our agency side. And I just dump resources in there whenever I have something good to tell. The cool thing is like as we've grown, we launched with a private closed doors launch. There's a good group of folks in there who are just like talking all the time and giving each other advice. So it's become a little bit of a closed knit community that we're thankfully, because everyone's accepting of it, going to open up again.

Nice. You'll send us the link when it's ready?

I can send you the link.

Put it in the show notes for everybody. Fantastic.

You did get that good URL though of school.com Facebook which is. We want that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. That's an amazing one. So you already gave us some really great advice for people starting out. You gave us good advice for the kind of budgets people should think about spending at different phases and what your sweet spot is. Do you have any other piece of advice that you want to leave us with something to think about as we go into, you know, 2026 and beyond in terms of what are the things that we should be watching out for and knowing that the landscape is changing. And to piggyback on that, you mentioned you play in these big sandboxes, but there are so many platforms that are being promoted. We know Threads, there's blue sky, TikTok is promoting lemonade. People are still on Clubhouse and you mentioned Snapchat earlier. So do you recommend these other platforms as well? Do you think people should really focus on the big ones and then, you know, if obviously they have ideal customers on the other platforms, maybe you start spending a little energy there.

Yes, I would generally spend most of your focus on Facebook and Google. The only platform that's really on my horizon that I'm thinking about more is Snap. Honestly, I don't think TikTok's even close to being ready for, for big budgets yet. There's some people that figured it out and they could, it works for their business. That's wonderful for them. But I think there's a little bit of confusion. There's like this whole TikTok shop thing and then there's people that are not using Shop and the algorithm moves too fast for anyone to keep up. I don't just, I don't think it's ready, I don't think it's good. Fine for awareness plays, but if you're a smaller sided business, I would run primarily Facebook, Google. The reason I bring Snap into the conversation here is because if you know anyone from the ages of basically 13 to 21, they don't exchange cell phone numbers anymore, they don't exchange Instagrams, they exchange Snapchats. So everyone talks on Snap, which means people are on the platform more and this group is becoming mature. They're starting to have some cash, which means it's time to advertise to them. Yeah.

Yeah. Fantastic. And do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, fairly motto? Just words that continue to inspire you.

The people that I've looked up to on social media specifically have often sacrificed things that most of us are not willing to or want to sacrifice. In fact, it's so much the opposite that if you ask most people what they're working so hard for, why they want to achieve a certain thing, they'll say because of my family or because I want X. Because I want. Yeah. And almost across the board, all of those folks that we would look up to for success have almost, they've almost unanimously given up the thing that they want the most for it. And I just try not to do that. And I hope most people think the same way.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

And wise words. So thank you so much, Sam. This has been really fun conversation and we'll definitely have to continue the conversation as the landscape continues to evolve.

Happy to thank you for having me here. I appreciate it. Of course.

Yeah. Thank you to everybody who's listening to this episode. Hope that you enjoyed and learned some really great things from Sam Piliero of the Moonlighters. Be sure to check out his resources in the show notes and I'll be back again with another guest to share their story, their journey and some tips and tricks for you very shortly. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of youf Brand Amplified don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out@yourbrandamplified.com.

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