How This VP Marketing Transformed Team Collaboration and Saved Costs by Tackling Ownership

Do you want to be specific product marketing or anything? No, no,

Yeah, so, uh, so, so Twitter is an interesting beast, uh, because, um, uh, there I have 4 counterparts. So the data division of Twitter has its own sort of head of marketing. Uh, we have, uh, an ad exchange, uh, which has its own head of marketing, uh, you know, and then we have a consumer person who has its own head of marketing. And when I got there, no one was talking to each other. Um, at all. Um, and, and so the very first thing I did, and, and, and, in particular with performance marketing where you really have to coordinate, um, what I found before I got there was that there, there were 3 organizations buying search ads and we're actually bidding against the exact same search terms. So, um, one thing I did is I set up something called the Performance Marketing Council and the whole idea behind that was to be able to share and trade information. um, and starting with sort of like, hey, let's not buy the same search terms. What I found out was it was immensely powerful because, um, it turned out that we were also buying competing tech stack pro pro products. We were designing our CRM tools and our lead management tools differently. Uh, we were, uh, we all had a collective problem with the product but we were all attacking it as, as, as four separate entities as opposed to combining our voice and really sort of get getting in front of the prioritization process. So it turned out that I came in with that, with one issue and I, and it, it actually broadened tremendously our effectiveness as an entire marketing organization by just simply talking and coordinating across these priorities. So what ended up happening from a results perspective was we were able to combine our voice and all of a sudden now the key things that we had issues with, with the product we're now front and center and prioritize with the dev team. Uh, we're actually able to combine all of our buying power now. So for example, we, we have 3 different people who are, who are doing uh um RFPs for, um, for, uh, webinar technologies. So we were actually able to combine sources and just get one RFP, uh, get better pricing because we're gonna use it across the business. And then the third thing is that, that we actually shared our marketing plan so we knew where there was duplication and we actually were able to reduce duplication. Through this process, we're actually able to eliminate two websites that were being built that we felt were duplicative with other websites that existed. We eliminated two full websites, that's insane um through this process so I was really proud of that effort.

Yeah, I mean I think you make, make a really good point in that the, the products were, uh, the problems existed and the problems were known, but no one was actually prepared to take action against. So the first thing is start taking action against it. Um, to be honest with you, when it came to this situation, I didn't ask, I didn't ask permission, I just did it. Um, and, uh, uh, and I think, uh, you know, it was really important for me to take ownership and I think ultimately I think that the company really appreciated that I did take ownership of, of it and just sort of get it done. I did have a little bit of skepticism of whether or not this was a good use of time right away, but soon after the first couple of meetings, Um, I started getting requests of more and more people who wanted to join the meeting, and which I think is a sign of really value, um, of the actual meeting itself. So it turned out to the point where we had so many people who wanted to join the meeting, we actually had to turn people away.

Uh, yeah, so, I mean, um, we were spending, um, you know, uh, Collectively we're spending about $600,000 a month on keyword spending. Um, and, uh, and, uh, I think our average cost per click was around $2.75 or so. Um, and then once we started to shut down some of these programs, um, and start to reduce the competitiveness of it, we're actually able to reduce our cost across the company down to about $400,000 so a third of the budget was saved. $1.2 million over $2.4 million over two, over a year and our cost went down to about $1.80 per click.

Got it. Yeah, you know, not, not competing against each other, but, but I, I also will tell you that I also did a pretty aggressive overhaul. Um, of the program, but, but the overhaul was really around trimming the fat, right? So getting really, uh, focusing more on long tail, uh, really making sure that we're only spending on the best performing, uh, keywords. But I think the biggest component of it was in fact the fact that we, uh, we, uh, providing a much more competitive, um, Uh, uh, less competition, which means higher quality, which means lower cost. Yeah, OK.