Gary Magnone

Something the best ad agencies can learn from McKinsey -   McKinsey gives high-conviction advice.   Most times, it's right.   B/c they have an edge...their people and their playbook.   If a client consistently disregards their advice, they do something refreshing…   Something most consultants and agencies never do...   They fire the client.   TLDR - they prioritize reputation over revenue.   They'd rather bleed quality and have a reputation for outcomes than bank extra rev.   Chalk it up to a "third edge."   This is how we operate too.   It's not that we're never wrong…   We're learning every day, too.   But if you're not ready to move quick and learn together, we're not a fit.   B/c retainers with the wrong brand--no matter how large--aren't worth the cost.

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Ready to learn about AI overviews and Generative Engine Optimization? Join Danelle C., Jen Cornwell and I this Friday on the Ignite Visibility YouTube Channel. What you will learn! 1. What Google's AI overviews are 2. Why brands need a complete Brand Sentiment Analysis to see what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot say. 3. How to do competitor research to understand what businesses are being recommended for important keywords. 4. How to do topic overview analysis to review the content that produces AI overviews And more! Set a reminder on YouTube here. https://lnkd.in/dmPRhAen See you there! #seo #generativeengineoptimization #ai

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Agencies (good agencies, at least) have a three-dimensional perspective that a full-time hire simply doesn't have. In-house testing: “I heard from someone at a marketing dinner that we should try to test this.” Agency testing: “We’ve seen very good results with this with other brands in this vertical. For our other clients, we've been able to see a pipeline lift of 5-15%. I suggest we set aside some budget to test for a few weeks to test. I’m sending the link to our testing doc so you can see how high we’d recommend prioritizing this idea.” You get the point - New ideas and tests are the lifeblood of good marketing campaigns, and a great agency doesn’t just know what to test; it knows how to assess and archive the results for long–term growth gains. If you’re weighing bringing on an agency vs. bringing on an in-house resource, find an in-house marketer and ask about some of the recent tests they’ve run. Do the same thing with an agency or two. A great CRO expert, Jeremy Epperson, often says that testing velocity is the key to growth and performance. Through that lens, who’s the better deal for your bottom line?

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Multiple Shopify stores had a rough Monday-Wednesday this week. After spending thousands $$$'s in team resources, we found out the issue... Crowdstrike patches impacted browsers + Cloudfare (Shopify's distribution network). Users had latency issues and difficulty with checkout. Was I frustrated? Yes. Lose sleep? Yes. Take it out on my team? Yes. Their fault? Yes. My fault? Yes. No one's fault? Yes. The fact is, even when these things happen (and they do happen in the world of digital), it may not be our FAULT, but it is our responsibility. There's always a way we can improve. Processes, communication, management (patience), all get sharpened when there's a "fantom" issue. Doesn't mean they won't happen again, but how we can recognize the pattern faster. Appreciate the diligence and, more importantly, the patience of the Everything Bagel team with me. #cloudstrike #shopify #digitalmarketing #management

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Blogging ain’t dead. The best blogs today bring together different types of content into one nice experience. And they don’t stand alone. They’re part of a bigger media and content experience. YouTube Shorts, clips, and audio snips, plus original imagery, make for a killer blog. It’s why Nick and I decided to start a blog on the TACK ⛵️ Network. The Moden Go-to-Market blog. Here’s a peek at the first article I just published. “Once upon a time, brands thrived using go-to-market (GTM) strategies like Inbound Marketing or Predictable Revenue while also gating every single piece of content they could. These playbooks were reliable, driving growth and success for many businesses. However, as the world continues to evolve, the efficacy of these strategies has begun to wane. The problem isn't the playbooks themselves; rather, they often focus more on the company's needs than the people they serve. Buyers' expectations and behaviors have changed, and brands must adapt to stay relevant and competitive. The solution lies in embracing a people-first approach to go-to-market strategies. By putting the customer at the center of every decision and interaction, brands can foster deeper connections, build trust, and ultimately drive more sustainable growth. In this post, we'll give you a go-to-market strategy framework that’ll help transform your organization's focus to be people-first” Check out the entire article here: https://lnkd.in/e-3xiimB Images and videos are coming this week. Head over to the TACK Network YouTube page if you want an early taste. p.s. It’s been just about six months since the launch of the TACK Network and Nick and I have learned a lot. We got some pretty sweet changes coming. This being one. The goal is more subscribers powered by an owned media strategy. Big shoutout and thanks to AudiencePlus. Pulling people into our free and paid memberships experiences in ClubPF presented by TACK. An owned community. A shoutout to Mighty Networks and Slack

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The Klaviyo agency business model is dead - face it without crying. In the next 2 years, you're going to see a massive exodus of email agencies in the DTC space that serve clients in the $1-10million revenue range and just a sprinkling of skilled freelancers serving this market segment. Here's what's happening and what you can do to prepare. BACKGROUND I own a Klaviyo Elite Agency. We've worked with over 130 brands and audited over 400. I've been in eCommerce for 17 years both on the brand & agency side and have enough context on how brands think & agencies grow at this point to see what I believe is an irreversible trend. HOW WE GOT TO THIS POINT Klaviyo has been the runaway market leader in the SMB space for Shopify businesses running email. Their brilliance has been in delivering powerful features with a small learning curve, eradicating the complexity associated with ESPs in the past which made it difficult for DTC brands to leverage email. But Klaviyo's success is also its bottleneck: it's now a public company and can't continue to grow catering to this market segment. It has to go enterprise, and many smaller brands are begrudgingly paying their bills waiting for a viable competitor. CURRENT LANDSCAPE The days of cheap META ads and Covid growth are over. DTC as a business model is losing its allure. The margins are shrinking, CAC feels like a battle that can't be won and the commoditization of products is destroying the value prop of 80% of brands. This leaves Klaviyo's main market segment fighting an uphill battle with razor-thin margins for paying agencies. These companies don't have serious retention problems: they have brand equity issues that can't be solved by sending more emails. Combine this with the fact that AI-enabled tech is aggressively cutting out the middlemen to deliver more value to merchants and you have the perfect storm for agency death. Lastly, the agency ecosystem is saturated. Klaviyo has over 9k partners and around 100k paying customers. The maths doesn't support scale. HOW CAN AGENCIES SURVIVE? I see 2 paths to survival (and growth) for agencies built exclusively around Klaviyo. 1: Increase your skills & hedge your bets on Klaviyo penetrating the enterprise market segment Cookie-cutter strategy & design templates are rapidly becoming worthless. These will be out-of-the-box features very soon in most ESPs that brands in the $1-10m range desperately need to reduce agency fees. To combat this you'll have to increase your skillset & learn to work with bigger brands. The volume will be less, but the retainer model significantly higher. 2: Leverage a Migration Model It's no secret that there's a war heating up for that compressed $1-10m market segment. Yotpo, SendLane & others are circling these brands aggressively and trying to achieve feature parity to migrate them. The financial rewards for striking a partnership with the right SaaS could be EXTREMELY lucrative CONT'D IN COMMENTS...

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I've worked with a lot of smaller Agencies over the past 12/13 years as a Fractional Agency CFO. Here are the top 10 Finance mistakes I see. i) Mixing up your Foreast and your Pipeline. They're separate things. Only confirmed fees/projects go in the forecast. ii) Underpaying Founders and thinking you're profitable. Your Agency has to be set up to pay you a competitive remuneration (salary and/or dividends) and still make a profit. Aiming for a > 20% margin iii) Not getting in a bookkeeper early enough. Outsource sooner than you'd think and free up your time to do what you do best. iv) Upfront billing is good for cashflow but distorts the P&L. Do it but either learn about revenue recognition or get your bookkeeper (see iii above to take care of it) v) Most P&L are too complicated. Keep it simple; Revenue - People - Overheads = Profit vi) Your P&L is a lagging indicator. It's always about what happens next - your focus should be more on the forecast and pipeline. vii) Don't run everything from one complicated spreadsheet. Run your P&L from Xero. Keep your forecast & pipeline on separate worksheets and, if needed, keep a 13 week cashflow viii) Underpricing. Understand your costs and calculate your ratecard based on 60% utilisation and 30% margin ix) Build up a cash buffer. Profitable agencies have cash buffers. Aim for 3 months' worth of running costs. x) Manage freelancers within your revenue budget. Too often there's not enough control of freelance spend within revenue/profit constraints. The urgent overtakes the important. Get most of those right (especially Pricing) and life becomes a lot easier. If you'd like to shortcut these mistakes I can help. Drop me a DM if you'd like a chat.

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I've seen enough - Meta's Bid Multiplier is a requirement in 2024. Since building out the proprietary tool for our team, we have run five structured split tests to determine the value of this approach. The results* speak for themselves: Client 1 (Beauty): +123% revenue, -23% CPA Client 2 (Beauty): +13% revenue, -16% CPA Client 3 (Apparel): +13% revenue, -12% CPA Client 4 (Footwear): +12% revenue, -10% CPA Client 5 (Sporting Goods): +67% revenue, -23% CPA * For two of these clients, these results are from 3rd party attribution solutions like Rockerbox - in other words, this isn't Meta grading its own homework. We're rolling this out to all of our clients this quarter. You need to be running broad audiences on meta. BUT, layering in your 1p data through bid multiplier amplifies the results by 15% or more. I would think in the current environment that any marketer would want that extra 15%. Here is your golden ticket. Our tool isn't glamorous (screenshot below), but the results are what we care about :) #meta #digitalmarketing New Engen, Inc.

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Comparison of GoHighLevel Conversation AI and AGENT Ai Chat Bot GoHighLevel Conversation AI Overview GoHighLevel is an amazing platform that allows you to have a high level of control over your contact automations. They even have their own built-in GoHighLevel Conversation AI. This AI is reasonably priced, coming included with their $497 and $297 plans. They charge you $0.02/message for GPT-3.5 Turbo usage, and you can re-bill this to your customer with markup included. You can train this AI on your website, FAQs, and have it operate in Q&A mode alone or have it set up to book appointments for you… this is all great stuff.... Read more. https://lnkd.in/dvZBRvPh #gohighlevel #aichatbot

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I nudged my team for their top catalog troubleshooting hacks... And wow, did they come through. Here's the scoop they dished out: 1. Suppression note? Roll up your sleeves and crack it open. Get to the heart of the matter in Seller Central. 2. Compliance docs should be your pocket ace. Keep 'em ready like your lucky socks on game day. 3. Got to file a ticket? Hit send with a Plan of Action as tight as your favorite jeans. Make it quick, make it smart. Who says you need to wait for heroics? Arm yourself with these tips, and become the Amazon problem-solver you were meant to be. #CatalogTroubleshooting #AmazonHacks #SellerDIY #MyAmazonGuy

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Zach Epstein is on a mission to make advanced marketing tools accessible to everyone. After spending six years at YouTube working on Privacy-Safe Ad Targeting and incrementality products, he saw the need to democratize the kind of experimentation that only the world’s largest advertisers were benefiting from. Haus was founded in August 2021 and is now at the forefront of causal inference analytics. With a $20M funding round announced in July, the team is focused on helping brands make smarter decisions through rigorous experimentation. In a world where the walled gardens of Facebook and Google continue to rise, measurement methodologies like causal analytics and geolift are becoming table stakes. If you are a marketer spending on more than one channel, this conversation is a must-listen! Here are a few key insights from Zach: 🔬 Experiment Like a Scientist: Zach is a strong advocate for causal experimentation, seeing it as the most accurate way to measure marketing impact. He encourages marketers to commit fully to testing, using data-driven experiments to validate assumptions and avoid wasting resources on tactics that don’t move the needle. 📊 Ad Networks Have Their Own Agenda: While platforms like Google and Meta are focused on performance, remember that their goal is to monetize all of their inventory, from premium to niche content. Not all ad placements are equal, so it’s up to marketers to be strategic about where to spend in order to drive real value. 🏆 Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin: Zach emphasizes the importance of nailing performance on core platforms like Google and Meta before jumping into new channels. He argues that 90% of your audience can be captured here, and spreading efforts too thin without deeply understanding these platforms can lead to underperformance. Have you experimented with causal inference or incrementality testing? What kind of impact did it have on your decision-making? -- 👋 Follow Paul Kovalski for media mix optimization content ♻️ Repost to share with your community

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Perplexity is finally entering the real Search Engine game. Given that it has pioneered fundamental changes in search behavior and positioned itself as an answer engine, Perplexity can for sure charge a bit of premium for ads. Personally, I find it to be very good. As per this report, the CPMs are around $50 which is like 15-20X more that your average Google pricing. The justification as per Perplexity is the following: 'More than 8 in 10 Perplexity users have an undergraduate degree, while 3 in 10 are in a “senior leadership position” and 65% are in “high-income white-collar professions,” such as medicine, law and software engineering.' I guess Perplexity is making the case with advertisers as the solution that caters to the smartest and the most affluent of answer seekers. As of now, it actually does. But $50 for that? May be a bit too much for most but not for all. As a CMO, I would gladly put that money down if I am reaching out HNIs or those who are doing deep research for a particular answer like 'How does unrealized capital gains affect me?'. Given that Perplexity's answers are essentially nested, that means, I can drive highly contextual ads based on the exact depth of where user's answer-nest is at. The deeper the depth, the closer I am paying attention or about to act. This aside, I am glad that search is getting a much needed makeover. For Google search ads beyond the first page is as good as burning money. #CMO #AdTech #MarTech #Search #Perplexity #Google

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Unengaged person records can be seen as a waste of your license fee or a hidden opportunity. Here are my insights on boosting ROI from your #Marketo Engage database by tapping into these unengaged records. Discover the potential within your database. https://okt.to/R4e9pT

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Most agencies CRUMBLE when Amazon gets tough. (We're not most agencies): When Amazon throws a curveball, my team hits a home run. The supplement space on Amazon right now? Pure chaos. → New certification documents. → Freaking clients → The agency gets the finger pointed. We've all been there, right? But here's the thing: While Amazon's rule changes can throw us off our game, situations like this are why I'm so damn proud of my team. - They stay on top of the latest compliance changes. - We're now ahead of the curve. - We even educate Amazon about new best practices. - Clients started off panicked – understandably so. It took some tough conversations. But now? That's not the case at all. We turned a potential crisis into collaboration. Clients see us as true partners. We weather the storm together. See, here's the thing... This is the agency life most people don't see: 1) Late nights digging through Amazon updates. ↪️ Updates that even ChatGPT can't simplify. 2) Explaining complex policy shifts. ↪️ So that the clients can grasp. 3) Staying calm... ↪️ When everyone else is losing their heads. This post is a shoutout to my team, and to every agency professional out there smashing the ever-shifting tides of e-commerce. PS - Want to grow your ecommerce brand on Amazon? We've helped 500+ brands earn over $550 million on the platform. Send me a DM saying “Amazon” for more info.

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You'll never capture as much market share as you think you will. I see it all the time from brands and acquisition targets: "This market segment is a kajillion dollars!" "If we only get 1%, that'll be 100 billion!" "Our forecast puts us growing 1 to 2% share." "Our top 5 competitors are only 20% of market." There have been a handful of extremely dominant market companies, and almost all of them are borderline oligopolies (or like Google, a literal monopoly). The vast majority of mature market segments that have been around since before the internet (think clothing, services, food, etc) are extremely fragmented. There might be a handful of superpowers, but even they are only 5-10% of the market share. Louis Vuitton, the most valuable luxury goods brand, does maybe $14-15b in revenue per year. Just handbags alone as an industry are estimated at around $70b globally (not accounting for everything LV sells that isn't a handbag) that'd still only be ~20% market share. Are you Louis Vuitton? No. The global shoe market is something like $400b per year. Guess how much Nike does? About $51b, and they sell a heck of a lot of stuff other than shoes. Again, giving them the most aggressive version of market share would put them at something like 13%. So if two of the most extremely successful and powerful brands ever conceived can barely crack 15-20% of market share in "mature" industries, what makes you think you can get to 1%? Or worse, even 5%? Now the reality is that you probably need to shrink your definition of a "market" in this case. Rather than shoes, it is athletic shoes. Rather than athletic shoes, it is running shoes. Rather than running shoes, it is long distance running shoes for hardcore runners. Definition of a niche is an important way to hone in on differentiation, which is the key "solution" to market share growth. You have to decide on things you DON'T do, things that your product is NOT. Then you can very clearly articulate what it is, and speak to that much narrower audience. In this way you can help eliminate (or at least, mitigate) the second constraint in the Three Constraint Model -- market share. #marketing #strategy #marketshare

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Schema markup is like cliff notes for search-engines, it helps them process information more efficiently and accurately (if done correctly). A definite must in your overall SEO strategy. https://lnkd.in/gfQyJJEY #SEO #schema #structureddata #marketing

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ICYMI: Yelp filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. Google is allegedly using its power to control local search and ads. This comes after a federal judge ruled in August that Google violated US antitrust laws with its search business. Yelp claims that Google manipulates search results to promote its own services, making it harder for users to access platforms like Yelp for reviews and local information. Google denies the claims and plans to appeal the decision, calling Yelp’s accusations “meritless.” What are your thoughts on this? Share in the comments! Source: https://lnkd.in/gC3f3SzV #SEO #digitalmarketing #marketing #growthmarketing #businessgrowth 🔔 Follow for proven SEO insights that built an 8-figure brand in just one year!

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🚀 Want to know what it takes to scale a business from $5k to $2 million? 🎯 Whether you're a brand, or marketer, this is packed with actionable insights that can transform your approach to digital marketing. Watch now and start scaling smarter 👉 Reply SCALE for the Link

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