Happy Sunday, Everyone!
Before diving into this week’s issue, I wanted to thank all of you for reading, sharing + supporting this newsletter. It’s difficult to believe the Digital Download is 500 days old with 75 issues already in the books, and just shy of 5,000 subscribers.
At the end of last week’s edition, I asked all of you for topics you’d like to see in future issues – and over a dozen people responded. Three of those individuals asked specifically about how to execute the tactics I’ve discussed in prior issues (data passback, creative mass-production, etc.) for clients/brands that don’t have an abundance of resources or technology.
One of my foundational beliefs for building + operating any business function - marketing, technology, operations, etc. - is to spend at least 90% of your non-working resources (i.e. excluding ad spend) on smart people, and no more than 10% on fancy tools + tech. While that’s likely to irk many in the SaaS and MarTech spaces, the simple truth is that you don’t need shiny tools with sleek interfaces and cutting-edge advertising to do wonderful, effective, needle-moving marketing. As an agency, our tool budget is less than 3% of our staff budget.
So, how do you do it?
CRMs
I’m an unabashed advocate for CRMs/CDPs. They are essential infrastructure for just about every business today, for two reasons: (1) they enable simple, centralized, near-real-time evaluation of a business’ current and future customer/client base and (2) they provide a single source of truth that can be used to inform many of the ancillary platforms (email sending platform, ad platforms, etc.).
In business (and in life), time is money. CRMs save a lot of time.
But let’s be honest: Salesforce - at its core - is a complex, shared Excel workbook with a bunch of macros + a mail client attached.
If you (or your client) doesn’t have the budget for a proper CRM, that’s A-OK. You can achieve 80%+ of the functionality of a CRM with a shared Google Sheet + some simple automations. If you’re curious, here’s a guide that’s been helpful in the past – and below I’ve included a screenshot of a fully-built-out lead scoring model, built in a Google Sheets workbook in less time than it took to finish a single whisky (neat, of course):
This entire workbook (and virtually every Google Sheets CRM I’ve ever built) is powered via Zapier. If you’re going to buy one piece of technology, that should be it. It’ll be the best $20 you spend.
The workflow itself is delightfully simple:
-Lead collected on website via GravityForms
-Lead data is ferried from website to GSheetCRM via Zapier
-Notification sent via Zapier + Gmail to Sales Team
-Email sent to prospect to schedule call / Zoom with SalesTeam
-Sales team updates record
-Zapier “listens” to sheet, and when “Simple Qual” changes, it responds:
- If call is booked, initial offline conversion is sent to Google + Meta
- If Nurture, it enrolls the user into a nurture sequence in Klaviyo based on the Role + Needs
- If Qualified, it sends a notification to the Sales team + sends a second offline conversion to Google + Meta
This entire system took less than an hour to build (excluding the email sequences - those took longer). The total cost to operate it is ~$80 per month ($20 for Zapier, $25 for Klaviyo, $24 for G Suite for 3 email licenses, $10 for Calendly). If you want to get fancier, add on Forecast Forge for ~$28/mo and use that to power your lead scoring model.
If your brand/client can’t afford $80 per month ($70 if you don’t need Calendly) - they probably shouldn’t have hired you in the first place.
Finally - this isn’t intended as a long-term, “forever” solution; the goal should be to use this as a prototype to demonstrate the value of a CRM to your client and help them grow to a stage where they can invest in a better, more robust system (like Salesforce or Zoho or HubSpot or whatever) – at which time this system seamlessly integrates into that (you’ll upload your existing records, switch over the Zapier workflows, etc.).
Creative
I’ve written extensively on the concept that creative quantity drives creative quality: it’s a power law game, and the more you produce, the faster you’ll find winners. The challenge for many brands is producing the volume of assets, especially with both financial + resource limitations.
So, how can you do it?
Partners + Technology
If you’re an eCommerce business, there’s no better tool than Soona/Trend. I’ve worked with them, some of our clients have worked with them, I’ve seen first-hand the results they deliver, and it’s nothing short of incredible. The process is simple: ship your product to them (they pay for it), build your shoot via their platform (no talking to people - my favorite), attend your shoot virtually (if you want), review the assets + buy the ones you like.
For ~$500 (the cost of a decent-but-not-incredible photographer’s half-day shoot, let alone location scouting, models/talent, hair/makeup, post-production), you’ll get 10-12 high-quality, website/ad account ready images. Drop those into Canva ($12/mo) or ChatGPT ($15/mo), layer in some incremental information (reviews, ratings, awards, press mentions, benefit highlights) and you’ll multiply those 10-12 assets into 100 to 150 creatives (if not more). Will they be Webby-worthy? Hardly. Will some of them be effective? Absolutely.
When you’re playing a power-law game, velocity matters. Being able to churn out this volume of assets WITHOUT having to stage, shoot + edit photos yourself is a massive unlock that will free up 40-60 hours each month to do other things (write content, build that CRM, work on your ad accounts, touch grass, whatever).
The same holds true for video content: both Soona (unboxings, how-tos, demos, etc.) and Trend (UGC) are incredible there, too. A modest, $1,000-$2,000 budget will get you 10-20 videos each month – which can then be re-mixed using a platform like Descript ($24/mo) into 50-100 assets. Again, none of these will be show-stopping, cinema-quality ads. They won’t approach the quality of a high-quality, professionally-produced TV spot. But for Meta/YouTube/TikTok ads? They’ll be just fine.
To take this to the next level, layer on a structural evolution matrix:
With this approach, an initial set of ~30 clips (middle column), informed by some basic information + customer interviews (left column) can become 3,000+ ad variations (a single example of which you see on the right). I absolutely LOVE this example of the approach in action from YouTube Ads Savant Cory Henke.
Finally - I want to dispel a persistent myth that lower cost content is inferior. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the marginal cost of creative is trending to $0.00. The explosion in AI/LLMs will only accelerate this trend. The brands that win tomorrow will be the ones that embrace this change and pivot their creative strategy to enable what I’ve discussed above.
All told, with the right strategy and the right partners, any brand can unleash 200+ ads into an account EVERY MONTH for less than $2,750 in hard costs and ~40 hours of time. This will certainly be impacted by the underlying distribution of assets (simple variants like swapping quotes or changing colors can be done in minutes; more complex/wholesale changes will take longer), but the point remains: creative production is a commoditized, power-law game. The brands with the lowest marginal cost (time + money) of production have an unfair advantage; the brands that temper brute-force creative velocity with data-informed feedback loops + structural iteration are unstoppable.
Keyword Research + Customer Insights
Perhaps the most common tool I see among clients are keyword research tools (AHRefs, SEMRush, Moz, Brightedge, etc.) – and that’s both a wonderful thing and a tragedy.
It’s wonderful because I genuinely believe that a better understanding of your customers/clients/prospects will lead to better marketing, and ultimately better outcomes. It’s tragic because 95% of brands I work with that pay for one of these tools (often to the tune of $500+ per month) don’t actually use the tool to anywhere near its potential.
Here’s the simple truth (again, I’m not about to make friends with anyone in SaaS): you can easily obtain 90% of the insights from these platforms at a fraction of the cost:
- Google Search Console is a veritable goldmine of search query data - most brands will find tens of thousands of unique queries, along with the pages Google believes are most relevant. Export that data into a Google Sheet, connect ChatGPT (there’s an addon) and you can do some remarkable analysis.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner is likewise incredible - especially if you have a pre-built keyword list from a tool like Search Console. It can generate an expanded keyword list from your seed (Google Search Console) data, then provide search volume + estimated CPC data to inform your strategy.
- Use ChatGPT or Gemini to thematically sort your now-expanded keyword list + raise primary themes (Google Ads also will automatically create ad groups, but I’ve found it’s a bit broad for my taste), then search for some of those key phrases on Google. See what pops up in the “People Also Searched For” section – if each of those keywords/concepts is covered by your expanded list for a robust sampling of your total list, great job. If not, add in the relevant ones.
Will this give you the bells & whistles of platforms like AHREFS or SEMRush or Moz? No. But having some data is far better than none, and freeing up $6,000+ per year for other purposes - training, advertising, marketing, sales enablement, creative - is no small thing for most smaller businesses.
Again, there is nothing wrong with any of these tools - I’ve used each one and I like most of them. They’re legitimately good. But their value is tied to their adoption + integration into your overall workstream. Paying $500 per month for a tool that was logged into a single time in the last quarter (something I just came across this week) is a colossal waste of money that could otherwise be used for growth.
As we (collectively) approach leaner economic times, every dollar saved becomes increasingly valuable – something that’s doubly true for small and midsize businesses with already-limited resources relative to their competition.
If you’re in the market for Customer Insights, I’d highly recommend the Keeping Up with the Joneses issue and the Importance of Self Scouting, both of which contain detailed how-tos on conducting competitive analysis and customer insights without the hefty price tag typically associated with either of those functions.
Of course, there’s no workflow or tool that will ever replace my personal favorite way to glean customer insights: asking actual customers. A simple random query over a time period (say, 30 days) + Zapier + a customizable email template = a steady stream of inbound feedback from actual customers, directly to my inbox. Zapier can then populate those responses back into a Google Sheet, and a GPT wrapper can summarize + extract key themes across the data set. If you want to get very fancy, track changes to the prevailing sentiment, response themes and product/service mix over time – you might be surprised.
The best part of the above workflow? It has virtually no marginal cost. I already use Google Workspace as my email provider, I already pay for more Zaps than I’ll likely ever need, and I have a ChatGPT pro subscription. All this does is maximize my existing investments that I’d make anyway to provide data and insight I can’t get any other way.
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? Get the most out of every dollar we spend? Tools are just one component of a successful marketing stack – one that’s getting smaller by the day. I hope some of these examples and workflows are helpful as you build out your (or your client’s) stack going forward. Keep the requests coming (just respond to this email) and I’ll include more of them in the coming weeks.
Cheers,
Sam
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