Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I think a lot of people focus in on one metric and that is definitely a mistake. Obviously we want to look at Roas, but they are treating Roas as the North Star when really they should be looking at their mer.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: You should know your acquisition costs. How much does it cost to acquire a customer? You should know your LTV numbers. What is the lifetime value of a customer?
[00:00:25] Speaker C: Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Life book podcast. I'm your host, Zach Bernard. You can find me on social at. It's Zack B. In each episode I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about their strategies and insights driving extra business growth. Today we're joined by Krista karpen and Nicolette McIntyre, co founder of Milk Media, an award winning performance marketing agency that helps e commerce brands in fashion, jewelry, beauty and home. Scale the revenue through paid social and search, email marketing and content production. Together they actually bootstrapped Milk Media in a loft in 2017 with no outside funding, no roadmap. And they built it into a team of 10 that has helped over 60 brands drive over $160 million in revenue. And they also won the 2025 Meta Agency Award for performance campaign of the year in the boutique agency category. Krista brings more of that business versus data driven perspective to the agency side of things, while Nicollet brings a dual background in high end fashion direction and performance marketing. They have this unique edge that not a lot of agencies have here, but yeah. Krista, Nicolette, welcome aboard. Thank you for coming on the show. The show here.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Cool.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: Well, one of the things I like, I always like to ask any people that come on the show is it is a business, it is an entrepreneurship podcast. You guys obviously have been around the block, to put it simply, is if you had to restart Milk Media from scratch, knowing everything that you guys know, what's maybe kind of like the one thing that you feel you would do differently, that maybe some people get totally wrong when they go about it.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll let Krista start that one.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: I mean, I feel like there's probably a lot of things being an entrepreneur, we're honestly figuring it out as we go. But I think the like one thing that comes to mind or you know, biggest lesson I think we've learned is really your contract, getting your contract really nailed down and make sure that you have defensible language in there to really cover yourself in situations. I think when we first started out we had more of a general contract and maybe it didn't clearly define deliverables. Or certain things. And then, you know, you sometimes get in bad client relationships and maybe it wasn't what they expected, it wasn't what you expected, and it all comes back to the contract. So we've definitely learned a couple of lessons there and have really refined our contract over the years. I feel like nowadays people, you know, you got Claude, you got Chat, GPT who could probably help you come up with a pretty good legal contract. So you can use that. But when we were first starting out, we didn't have those resources. And yeah, I think there were a lot of gaps there. And tightening that up I think would really help. You know, in situations where you're dealing, dealing with clients.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it's inevitable you're going to have a couple nightmare clients.
[00:03:28] Speaker C: So I think we all do at like some point. One of the things that I've, I've always like, realized, okay, make sure to set the expectations correctly. But you're still going to have. People will not understand what you're talking about in the first place. And then you get to delivering the service, you do amazing work, then there's like a Ms. Misalignment, like expectations. But I like what you mentioned because I feel a lot of people, you're right, they'll go to like signatures, IO they'll find like this one template, like contractor agreement or anything like that. They'll slap their company name on there and like, okay, we're going on the legal front. Let's. Let's rock and roll. And then they learned the hard way that there's probably like 50 clause that they should have in there and they didn't. So live and you learn, I guess
[00:04:10] Speaker B: learned the hard way a couple of times on that. But
[00:04:15] Speaker A: yeah, I think also having like, I mean you don't have to have like a lawyer on call, but making sure that you have somebody in cases that do come up that you can go to, so you already have maybe like a relationship with somebody there.
And then I think the other thing was know your numbers, know what your goal of starting this company is. Like when me and Krista first started our goal, you know, we were, we were a lot younger, but you know, we were like, yeah, we want to get a yacht. And like, that was like our goal.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: We.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: So, I mean, kind of, okay, we didn't, I don't think we ever really thought we were going to get a yacht, but yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe
[00:05:02] Speaker A: you didn't think we're going to get. But anyway, you know what, it could happen. But I think really having a Strategic plan on how you're going to be profitable. Because obviously you're starting this business, you want to make money.
And yeah, you could be bringing in the money, but like, are you keeping track of your expenses? Are you, are you hiring employees? Are you taking into consideration taxes, do you need insurance, things like that, that kind of eat up your profit and you don't really realize that until it starts to happen and you're like, wait, we're bringing in all this money?
Where is it going?
So I think really mapping out profitability and goals is, is some solid advice there.
[00:05:50] Speaker C: Yeah, no, like aligning on like where you want to go in the first place versus just like diving in. And I'm just like, I mean, I feel like on some level you do need to like dive in and like figure things out as you go. Because if you haven't done it before, obviously, but you still need to have a couple ducks in a row to make sure that you know where you're going. And not everyone has that structure, like foundation in place. So I like that. I think it's a pretty important one here. But shifting gears a little bit because I'd love to dive a little bit more on the side of the agency. What you guys are doing, how you guys work with E commerce brand.
When a client comes to you, someone comes to you, what does that process look like? I guess one of the questions I would have is how do you figure out what to focus on first? Because there's a lot of different things that you could do to help grow a brand, but it doesn't mean that one is better than the other or that you even need to do like one of those here.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean we definitely always recommend first meta, but before we even get to that, we really take a deep dive in our onboarding process.
Even before signing on a client, we really take time to figure out where they are in their business, what their actual needs are, what their actual budget is, and then kind of what sets us apart is that that onboarding process of again taking that deep dive, really making sure that we're aligned not just in their business goals, but also with their brand voice, their messaging, their branding, things like that.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah, and we, I mean our onboarding process is pretty thorough when we're starting with a new client. And I think a lot of clients would like it to be a little bit quicker, but I mean it is about like a four week turnaround time for us to be able to launch. And the reason it is that is because we do take a lot of time to make sure that we're not just throwing up ads or email where we're doing this thoughtfully. We're delivering creatives that are going to design, to convert and that are, you know, true to their brand and true to their audience. So with our onboarding, you know, we do a pretty thorough audit of their existing channels. So meta, Google, email. We also do an audit of their website and organic channels. Essentially, where are we driving traffic to? We want to make sure we're setting them up for as many conversions as possible. Like Nicolette mentioned, we do a deep dive into their brand. Who is their target audience? Why are people buying from them? Why are they not buying from them? So we clearly define all of this up front. We map out their budget, we do a budget analysis, we do a profitability analysis for them, making sure they get that in check.
And yeah, so it takes about, you know, about a week for us to get through that and then about a couple of weeks for us to get through the creative strategy and development.
But you know, we work with a lot of similar clients. They're all E commerce, they're all within fashion, jewelry, beauty, home. But really each client target audience and their product is unique. So it does take that time in the beginning to make sure that we're really strategizing for them.
And it's also why a lot of clients choose to partner with us is that, you know, they've had agency relationships where they felt the creative didn't stay true to the brand, it didn't feel on brand. And we really make sure that we do that for our clients.
[00:09:08] Speaker C: Yeah, and I feel like I'm hearing like that data driven approach like you mentioned, like a couple different things that you're doing, but also going beyond just because, I mean there's a lot of brands, like a lot of agencies, companies that work with agencies, sorry, they work with E commerce brands. And like the first thing they do is like, okay, I'm just gonna put up some Facebook ads. You know, we're gonna manage that for you. You know, we're gonna see what kind of roas we can get you. But they, they don't go like a little bit deeper into like that process, like figuring out like, okay, where are we sending their traffic? How can we optimize so they get a better OAS on like what they're actually spending, like just diving a little bit deeper and having more like a strategic methodological approach. And it seems that's what Kobe have. Even if that onboarding process takes a little bit longer, it Means that when you go to market, you get those ads running, they're going to have a much better performance compared to if you just launch them like one a week and then you see what sticks on the wall and then you improve from there. So it seems to me that you come at it from more like, okay, let's optimize first based on like everything that we're seeing within this brand as opposed to like, let's just like the classic just spend more money, see what works. Obviously that's like a good advice in a way, but it's better to optimize as much as you can before just spending a bunch of money than adjusting. I could be wrong, but that's kind of my perspective here.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
And you definitely are set up for more sustainable growth this way as well.
[00:10:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I like that. And I know we talked about. Nicola, one of the first thing you mentioned when I asked you about what do you guys do first directly mentioned, like Meta. And one of the things is there's a lot of talk right now about meta ads becoming less predictable, rising CPMs, there's a bunch of like, algorithm change and all that fun stuff. I'd be curious, like, what are you guys actually seeing work for E commerce brand in 26? Like, what do you think most brands are?
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Strong opinion on that one.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Okay, Well, I mean, there's definitely a lot of algorithm changes. That's what everybody's talking about. They're talking about Andromeda. Like Meta is very much pushing for.
They are pushing for some, you know, automation and obviously, you know, they've been pushing the AI for a long time with the, the creatives.
So there are, oh, partnership ads. That's another thing. They creators, they, they just had their like, summit and that was like a good chunk of. It was like partnership creators, partnership ads.
But beyond all that, like unpredictable.
I don't think so. I feel like Meta is probably one of the most predictable platforms out there.
Those are our main platforms that we advertise on are Meta and Google.
Yes, you have to keep up with the changes, but we've been doing this a long time and there's been a lot of changes. We've lived through the iOS nightmare of 2021 and we survived that. So no, I feel like of all the platforms, it probably is one of the most predictable. You just have to, you know, stay current on the trends and stay up with what, with what Meta wants and what Andromeda wants. They want that creative diversity. They want volume and ads. So, you know, there definitely has to be a strategy to, to keep up with that. But our clients across the board, you know, tend to see the strongest results on Meta and Google and it's why we recommend they put the bulk of their spend there.
[00:12:38] Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting because, yeah, like, like you say, I feel that if you're keeping up with the updates, then it can become predictable. But if you do the same thing, you don't innovate, you don't get in touch with like, what's going on in the space, then, yeah, of course it's becoming not predictable. You're not adapting to what the platform wants in the first place.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: For sure. And like, yeah, we, we will do audits for like, potential clients just to tell them, like, what we would do differently. And like, some of the stuff I see in there, it's like, yeah, they're working with agencies or freelancers or doing it themselves where, like, they have, like, practices in place from 2016. And I'm just like, this isn't going to work anymore. Like, you need to, you know, broad targeting, you need to lean into the algorithm. So, yeah, I think it's mainly just making sure that you're keeping up with the changes and seeing that our main thing we do here, obviously we do stay on top of that.
[00:13:35] Speaker C: I love that. Yeah. Because I feel like a lot of people are just going to do the basics and I feel like we've been personally guilty of that too. Like, we've tried, like, running ads. I think we broke even when we ran them. But one of the things that was like, so many new updates, like, coming in, like, coming. And I feel that if you have like a bird's eye view perspective, like if you're doing it for multiple people, it's probably a bit easier to keep up with the changes and like, see like, what's going on. Like different ad accounts and everything like that. So it gives you like an advantage being able to like, run all these. But that's not an excuse for, for our ads, like, falling flat by like, any means here. Just like, emphasize that.
But I know we talked about, like, paid ads, obviously, Facebook meta, all that fun stuff. But another one that I actually like because I'm on like, Twitter X and like, there's a lot of people that are like, bigging with like, klaviyo and like all that fun stuff like email marketing. And I always think that it's like an interesting channel because you're technically not spending. Like, once you have like an email list built, you can leverage that and like Pump that milk that for like more money just by like leveraging it, which I thought is always interesting. And it's something that a lot of e commerce brand have. Some of them, they might even be leaving a lot of money on the table because maybe they don't have a welcome flow like seven or maybe they're not sending enough campaigns or anything like that. I'd kind of be curious, like, what would you say separates the brand that genuinely are using email marketing as like a revenue driver versus the ones that are basically just sending like a newsletter and calling it with a 5% of their revenue being attributed to email marketing.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Segmenting.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Segmenting their audience, doing with flows. Well, segmenting definitely in campaigns, but and then with their flows, they might be doing too many, too many flows or they set it and forget it. And I think a lot of times they also are reinventing the wheel each time where you can kind of repurpose content that works, take it or take templates and do iterations off of that for your campaigns. But yeah, I think the biggest, biggest thing would be the segmenting and then also just like relying solely on email.
Again, like, we really niche down to these particular services because they do work so well together where meta, Google, they're bringing in the traffic and then email really nurturing those customers.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I feel like, yeah, to Nicolette's point, I think, yeah, like she said, it's crazy how many people like we go and we look at their accounts and they're like still sending to their entire list, which I can't believe people do that. I was like, number one rule, quit emailing your entire list. Like you're messing up your deliverability, your, your open rates. Like, you're not good. So I think, yeah, the segmentation is, is a big one. But I, I think to Nicot's point too, with the flows, you.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: The main.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: I think the two things we see the most are you're either not doing enough enough or you're doing too much. We have audited accounts where they have like 50 plus flows in place. And yes, we want to have a level of personalization in those flows, but when you're segmenting your flows that much, you're getting very little people into each flow and it's actually working against each other. Your revenue per recipient is probably very low per flow.
So we will actually go in there and consolidate a lot of those flows and like, let's keep it simple and let's focus on the flows that are actually going to drive revenue and then really focus on. Yeah. Those money makers, your welcome flow, your browse abandoned, your abandoned checkout, your customer, thank you. Your customer win back. Those are the ones that you should be continually optimizing a B testing, updating the imagery, making sure that those are bringing in the bulk of the revenue so that they can work for you in the background.
[00:17:43] Speaker C: Yeah. And that was going to be like one thing. I was like a bit curious because I know when you're running like Facebook ad, for example, you're going to have different creatives and maybe target different audiences and like you can a B test stuff, see what works best. But you can do something a little bit similar with like email marketing where you can have like different, like you can segment your list, you can a B test different subject line. And there is so many little things that you can do. And like I'm not an E commerce person, but I always find it interesting just like understanding like the psychology of like what makes someone buy, like what gets them more like engaged. Do you guys have like some sort of like philosophy or like process when it comes to like a B testing, like what works? And I imagine one of the advantage doing it across so many different accounts is you see what works for other people. Then you can implement and always optimize as much as possible where you get to like a point where it's optimized as much as you can. I mean there's obviously things that you can optimize more, but it decreases if you guys have an approach behind that.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So yeah, there's a million different things that you can a B test at any given time. And that's also the thing. You don't want to be testing too much all at once or then you're not figuring out what works. But typically we will start with like subject line testing. We want to get that open rate up first. And that's typically going to be the best place to start with flows and then with campaigns. A big one that we spend a lot of time testing is the campaign send time.
Klaviyo has a lot of features now to send personalized send times to do smart send time tests, which always have a hard time saying so that is a big one. And you'll be surprised at the times that usually come up. It's usually usually like we see a 10pm we see like a midnight emerge as like the, the top performers there. So we spent a lot of time there of like first getting people to open the email. Once we've really optimized the open rates, then we Move into a B tests that are going to be more relevant to click rates. So this is testing things like, you know, your CTAs, the, the email layout, the, the imagery in there, the content of the email to get that click rate up. Because at the end of the day, if people aren't opening, they're not clicking, then they're not buying. So you really have to optimize those rates first in order to get the overall revenue up.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: And one of the things, I mean, it's obviously not directly related to like email marketing, but one of the things that anytime I speak to anyone like marketing, they talk about that it's attribution. It's like always something that comes up consistently, specifically when you're thinking about like performance marketing. And it seems like a lot of brands that they think that their numbers are telling them one story, but they might be misreading the data like entirely. So I'd be curious, like, how do you approach attribution with clients you work with? What are, I guess, some common mistakes that you see these brands make when they're trying to measure what's actually working? If you don't measure it correctly, you're just shooting in the dark, hoping that something works because you have false data or inaccurate data, to put it simply.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people focus in on one metric and that is definitely a mistake. Obviously we want to look at roas, but they are treating roas as the North Star when really they should be looking at their mer. There is a lot of attribution overlap and you really just need to be able to read that as a whole and really look at the numbers more holistically than just focusing on one metric.
[00:21:23] Speaker C: Yeah. And just for someone that's maybe not too familiar with the E commerce space, such as me, what is MER just for like your audience too?
[00:21:32] Speaker B: MER stands for Marketing Efficiency Ratio. So it basically takes your total revenue divided by your total spend.
Could be the other way around, but basically it's like, how much are you spending and how much are you making? So it actually just takes attribution out of the picture altogether. It's like at the end of the day, what are we spending? What are we making?
Because yes, if I could like record myself explaining attribution, I think that would probably be good because people ask all the time and it's a very hard concept for people to understand and for clients to understand.
But every platform is going to report on their own attribution settings. So Klaviyo is on a 5 day opener click meta is on a 1 day view, 7 day click. Google has their whole system that they, they operate off of. So what ends up happening, like Nicolette mentioned is you get a lot of attribution overlap. You get, you know, if I clicked a meta ad and then I searched it on Google and then I engaged with an email, all three platforms are going to take credit for that sale. So you end up with a lot of attribution overlap. Something that we do is we do like an attribution overlap analysis across all of our clients to see on average what percent of overlap are we seeing? Some clients see a huge level of overlap, some a little bit smaller. But on average I think last year was about a 16% overlap between, between the platforms. So one taking that into consideration,
[00:23:07] Speaker A: again,
[00:23:08] Speaker B: if you don't want to worry about any of this, the MER is going to be the best metric to look at because you don't have to think about attribution at all. The other problem that we run into is we work with a lot of jewelry clients, a lot of fine jewelry clients.
You're telling me that I'm going to see a meta ad and purchase within seven days of clicking a $10,000 piece of jewelry? Probably not. That customer purchase cycle is a lot longer than that. So, so even meta themselves, they're like we have incremental attribution or they've made lift tests available to everybody. Now I think there's certain spend thresholds, but essentially the lift test is going to say what is the overall effectiveness of the ads if we're not looking at just a click and a view, how people interacted with the ads and how that affected their purchase journey. So there's so much more, more than just last click that goes into it. Obviously there's you know, software out there like triple whale north beam that you can kind of define your own, your own attribution and look at that from different measures. But those, those platforms of software are expensive and a lot of our clients maybe, you know, can't delve completely into that. So we try and you know, look at this from different angles and again it all comes back to your marketing efficiency ratio as really going to tell you how effective your marketing is being.
[00:24:31] Speaker C: Yeah, but one thing that I find interesting though is like some people, like you mentioned, like the jewelry example, like very good example, like some people are going to look at this, then they'll look at their attribution. They're like, oh, like all of our traffic is coming from maybe like Google Ads. But then so like, okay, maybe let's pause the Facebook ads. Google Ads is like the one crushing it, doing like very well. And then to like, that's very weird. We're not really getting like more traffic now. Like, I don't know what's going on, but it's like. Yeah, it's because the Facebook ads are prompting people to go look you up and they were clicking on your Google Ads and that's how like that entire like wheel was going.
And I feel that. Yeah, again, if you don't know your number, you don't understand it, you're going to be making decisions that are going to affect like your entire ecosystem and your entire brand. So like attribution probably one of the most important thing, especially when it comes like the B2C side of things here.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. You need to look at everything as a whole.
And yeah, and we have had had clients drop off on if they see, you know, a slow month on Google or slow month on Meta, oh, let's pause or let's take budget down. And it's, it's like you see the direct correlation with all the services and, and so it kind of just messes up the, the
[00:25:45] Speaker C: funnel momentum maybe.
Yeah.
And I feel like there's an education piece that comes into it. Like you have to go back to clients like, hey, this is normal. We're seeing it across like a bunch of other accounts. If you do this, this is going to happen. And then a lot of people might have a little bit of an ego to like, no, I don't think so. Let's give it a try. And then goes down and they're like, you were right. And then you obviously have to adjust from there. So a little learning curve here. But one of the things I, I'd love to understand for like any like E commerce brand owners, what are some of the like key metrics, KPIs that they should actually be paying attention to when they're trying to like scale. And like, which one do you think that a lot of founders focus on that end up just being like a distraction that they shouldn't even be spending their time looking at?
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Well, I think we already said it. Yeah.
Really? Yeah. A lot of them focus on roas, which as we mentioned, you know, it doesn't always tell the biggest story. Of course we do look at that and we use that to make decisions in the, in the ad account. But it isn't the end all be all of the, the success of your, of your brand. So other metrics we like to look at are obviously, yeah, mer, as we mentioned, but really you should know your acquisition costs. How much does it cost to acquire a customer? You should know your LTV numbers. What is the lifetime value of a customer? You should know your contribution margin. How much does it cost to ship, produce the product? How much are you actually making on all of that? And these are all metrics that we take into account when we do the profitability analysis for our clients. We do a budget analysis and we will tell them, you know, based on your revenue targets, this is how much you need to spend in order to hit that, based on what we expect to happen in the platform. But is this, you know, amount we're recommending, is it actually profitable? A lot of our clients, if they know their numbers, they're comfortable not being profitable on the first order or breaking even on the first order because they know that this customer is likely to purchase, you know, 30, 60, 90 days down the line. So the cost to acquire them, they're willing to spend a little bit more when they know that the customer is going to spend more over their lifetime. So really understanding that and not saying like, oh, we need a three times return on ad spend. We've had clients we've worked with, especially in like the subscription space. They're comfortable with a negative real ads because they know we're buying them into the subscription and getting them to continue to purchase over time. So again, I think those are probably the key, key metrics that you want to know for the overall health of your business.
[00:28:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I've always found that interesting that like, if you know, like your ltv, it's like, okay, I can literally be a negative roas when I start knowing the fact that in a couple months we're going to be much more profitable and it's worth doing it. And I feel a lot of people just don't understand that or they, they just don't do that. They want to make sure they always have a, a positive roas, which can be an issue in some cases here, but for sure.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: And then I think a lot of times, like we've had a couple clients do this, but they absolutely success over the daily numbers because the daily numbers, they fluctuate. So if you're in there looking in your account every day, it's going to make you crazy because you're going to get so hyper focused on like we were down, you know, for three hours and then what happened or today we were negative but you know, but then the next day like you make up for it. So there is, there's always going to be fluctuation, fluctuation in the market and that directly impacts, you know, buyer decisions, things like that. But yeah, you can't, you can't get in there and obsess over the daily numbers. That's definitely something that we've seen some clients do and, and they're pulling their hair out. We're like, it's okay, like just let us take care of it. It'll be okay, we promise. Just give it a couple more days.
[00:29:44] Speaker C: I feel like probably like the best example comparison here is like when you look like the stock market, like you talk to like anyone and like put it in there, leave it there, don't even look at it. But the people that look at it, I'm guilty of that sometimes too. Like I think today it was like crazy yesterday she was like down so much. You're like, shit, that's a lot down. And you look the next day it's up like that you're like, okay, it's just a roller coaster. Like same thing, same thing with a NAT account. Like you can't just look at that, a one hour view, like a one day view and be like, what's going on? Like you need to look at the average like week over week or like month over month and then you'll probably have a better perspective. There's so that's an interesting show. And then as like we wrap things up. One of the things I always like to ask to like anyone that comes on the show and I'd love to hear it from both of you actually for like any E Commerce brand owner out there, like hey, we want to like scale the company. Honestly I'm not too sure what we should be doing. What are the maybe like two, three things that you would recommend them to do look at in order to be able to scale whether that's okay. Let's go look in Klaviyo. Let's look at all the flows that we currently have. Let's maybe calculator ltv. Are there any like bullet points things that you're like hey, go do this first and you'll be in better shape than you probably are now.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: I think getting your website optimized for a good user experience, investing in that, obviously investing in paid media, email marketing because again you need that paid media to be driving the traffic and then the email really comes in and nurtures that.
Also invest in content. Whether that's you know, video, photo, whatever it is, it really makes a difference in, in your accounts and really building that brand trust.
Also having like a diverse type of not just ads but content as well and investing in upfront, investing in like your branding, things like that, where you can really communicate your brand, not just like your product but like your brand, your brand story, what you stand for and building that trust for your customers to not just purchase once, but come back and really have that relationship with your brand.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think, I think it, the website is definitely huge. I mean we're running ads, we're putting out emails, but there's only so much we can do once they get to the site. If it's a poor user experience or they're not doing a good job of selling the product, they're going to essentially be wasting their money by driving traffic to a site that's not set up to convert. And that's why we do that website audit during onboarding is to help them develop better product pages, collection pages, homepage to make sure it's designed to convert.
But yeah, brands who are really, you know, looking to scale, I think it kind of just goes with it. You have to be willing to spend, you have to be willing to put the budget in. It's, we have some clients who, who see, you know, insane results and they're, they're hesitant to spend more and you're just not, you're not going to, to grow like that. So being willing to invest into Meta, Google, other platforms like Pinterest, TikTok is really, it is a necessary evil to, to really grow and scale your business, you have to be putting money into ads. Obviously you want to be doing that in a strategic way, but there's no way that you are going to go from a hundred K a month to a million a month by not investing into these, into these platforms. You just, you just won't.
[00:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think that's simplest advice you could give. Just put more money into the machine, let it work, let it, let it do its job.
[00:33:44] Speaker B: Here's the budget, let's go.
[00:33:46] Speaker C: Just optimize everything on like the back end, front end, make sure everything looks good and then just put more money in the machine, let it run up.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Really all it takes. I mean obviously you need to have a good product too and a good product market fit. But I mean that, that's pretty easy honestly, if you have the right tools in place to really make it sellable. That's our job, that's our job to market it. And um, yeah, I think we can do that with, with most products if the, the good base baseline is there.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And like, you know, growing up in the fashion industry back, back in the day, you know, it was like you developed a line or a product and you took it to market, you took it to these shows and people, you know, retailers would buy it and you'd make a lookbook and maybe you'd, you know, get an ad in a magazine or be featured in an editorial. And that was like, you know, your marketing and now it's, it's changed so much. It's just, it's not just that. It's. Yes, developing the product is like, seems like such a small part of it now, but really marketing that product, making sure you have your organic in place, your paid media strategy, your email strategy, your branding strategy, all these, your, your creator strategy, ugc making sure all of these things line up and it really just, really just shows up in, in your brand and again builds that brand trust. The, our most successful brands that we see do all of these things. They have it dialed in but also the, the founders show up too. They show their face. People love the backstory. They love to hear about how the brand was started, things like that and having, you know, the founders talk about their product because they are, they're the experts. They're the experts. They're the ones who's going to tell you or tell the customer really why you should buy this product or about educating about the product. So there's a lot of, a lot of things that need to be lined up and if you really want to have a successful brand, you will invest in these things up front and, and set yourself up for success, all of that.
[00:35:59] Speaker C: Well, we, we covered a lot of ground but I really appreciate you both coming on the show today and joining us. We've, I don't think that that many e commerce person, I think maybe one and spend a little while to put it to be honest with you, I think it was before like Andrew Meta or something like that and I know a lot has changed on Facebook since then here, but for anyone that wants to get in touch with you guys, I know you guys have like the website, you guys have LinkedIn. What's kind of the, the best place to, to get in touch with you guys here?
[00:36:25] Speaker A: You can email hellokedmedia.com or go on our website.
There's a work with us button. Click that button, fill out the form.
That really gives us some useful information. When booking a call with us, you
[00:36:42] Speaker B: can follow us both on LinkedIn. We're both on LinkedIn and our Milt Media on Instagram as well.
[00:36:51] Speaker C: And the website, it's Milk media dot com. Correct.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: Milk Milk.
[00:36:56] Speaker C: Okay. Milk Milk media dot com. Perfect. Well, we're going to put in like, the show notes anyway, so if anyone wants to get in touch with you, LinkedIn, we're going to put all that fun stuff in there if people want to reach out to you. But yeah, thanks again for, for coming on and to your listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, like, comment, review all that fun stuff. Reach out to Nicolette and Krista here if you found value in this conversation and then, yeah, until then, keep pushing and we'll see you in the next one.
