How Can Marketing Drive $100 Million in Revenue?

Unlock the secrets of explosive growth marketing with insights from Alex Montas who has driven over $200 million in revenue for top brands. Learn from his groundbreaking strategies at Bloomberg Media, where he skyrocketed the company's revenue to $100 million in just three years through focused performance marketing, deep audience understanding, and innovative pricing experiments. Discover how proactive adjustments in pricing can lead to substantial revenue gains, especially in a global market.

Explore the future of marketing as we discuss insights on the resurgence of getting great ROI on Facebook advertising, LinkedIn's expanding horizons beyond B2B, and the burgeoning landscape of podcasting. We’ll highlight the growing potential of YouTube and how investing in video content can be a game-changer. Embrace the power of focusing on a few key strategies, mastering specific channels, and consistently experimenting to drive results.

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Transcript

Growth Marketing Success Stories

Eric Eden 0:00

Welcome to today's episode. Today we are talking about growth marketing and we have a great guest who has helped drive over $200 million in additional revenue for big brands. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Montas 0:17

Eric, thank you so much for having me.

Eric Eden 0:19

Awesome. Why don't you start off by just sharing a minute or two more details about who you are and what you do, what you've done?

Alex Montas 0:27

Sure. So, I'm the founder of the Remarkable Aegis. I've been doing it for 12 years. It's a great name, so I'm happy to be at the Remarkable, given that we're running the Remarkable Aegis. But, as you mentioned, over the last decade I have been focusing on growth, marketing, performance, marketing, growth overall and I have achieved over 200 million in incremental revenue for companies such as Verizon, bloomberg and, most recently, at Ben Maps, where I was the CMO of a mixture of an agency and tech company owned by Billings.

Eric Eden 1:04

Awesome, let's jump right in. We're ready to be inspired. Why don't you share a story with us about some of the best marketing you've done, that you're the most proud of?

Alex Montas 1:14

Yeah, I'm proud of a lot of things, right, I'm proud of leadership. I'm proud of influencing people to do great marketing or learning from great marketing leaders. But I think, in today, what I want to talk about was my time at Bluebird Media. I joined Bluebird Media, I want to say, in 2015. And I was the head of performance marketing, running all our key media, all our partnerships, and then being very intimately close to how we manage our audiences, how we manage our data, working closely with the product email teams, homepage team and I think that big story there is. That was a business that grew up super fast and that because we did a lot of things very well, including a lot of what I did on paid.

Alex Montas 1:59

But to jump to the end real quick, we grew up Bloomberg Media their very first subscription direct to consumer business to 100 million. We're a period Bloomberg Media their very first subscription direct to consumer business to 100 million for a period of three, three and a half years, and a lot of what went well. There was to have a lot of autonomy, was to have an appetite for testing A-B testing and then just making sure that we understood who our segments and our targets were in terms of who our audience was, and then use the data to exclusively target those people. So, at a high level, I'm very proud of the work we did there.

Eric Eden 2:35

Getting to $100 million in revenue. That's living the dream, in every essence of it, for most businesses. If you can drive that sort of growth via marketing, that's great, and I definitely agree. Testing is really key. Knowing your audience and doing the right testing is definitely key. I'm also curious what channels were the most effective? If you just had to say the top couple of channels that, after you did the testing, were the most productive, what did you see?

Alex Montas 3:06

Yeah, so this is 2018. So Facebook was extremely efficient. Email was extremely efficient. Those, I want to say those, were the channels that kind of provided the biggest ban for our buck From a marketing standpoint. There were a lot of things also going on with SEO, but, given that it was a news organization, I was there before I came there and it's not quite a channel but homepage testing and landing page utilization, price testing, I want to say, was the last variable that really helped out a lot, and I don't know if a lot of people consider that a channel, but for me, the ability to mess around with our price, especially because we were a global company and really starting to think through what are payment things? What is do I do if I'm in Germany? Do we do euros versus dollars? That was a big thing for us and that unlocked a lot of revenue.

Eric Eden 4:04

That's great. I think that pricing, testing and packaging and experimenting with that a lot of people would probably define that as a tactic, but I myself have seen the value of it in previous companies where I was a CMO. We hired some of these amazing pricing firms like Simon Kutcher Partners amazing company but they charge six figures to come in and they give you all of that testing and experimentation to do over the period of six 12 months and it's like a huge motion and project. So being a growth marketer and being able to take that on and do it is pretty awesome. But I think that is a key tactic where a lot of companies grow, because if you have the wrong pricing and packaging, you're going nowhere fast, right, correct?

Alex Montas 4:58

And I think it's great that we have Facebook as a channel, we have email as a channel, that we have Facebook as a channel, we have email as a channel. But the minute we understood, going back to where our audiences are, and that if you are in Singapore, if you are in Australia, if you're in Hong Kong, if you're in Brazil, those are different price points and, given that we had a global audience, also maximizing the offers that you would give was something that really allowed us to maximize those other shares. So I think that I actually, in my last role, I also hired consultants to see what I didn't talk to people and then they weren't like what is your willingness to pay? I kind of just actually let me throw out a price based on my competitors, based on, for example, what other local places in my case with Bloomberg, other local publishers were paying.

Alex Montas 5:56

But I also looked at other comps. I looked at the price of Netflix and the price of YouTube and I compared it to what they were charging in the US and I said you know what this is probably going to. This pricing is going to have to be a lot different, Because I saw that Netflix, for example, was charging 10% in the US than what they charge in Argentina. So I was just like I'm not going to wait for a quantitative analysis or for an agency to go and talk to people. We're going to go, we're going to do that right away. We're going to make some changes.

Alex Montas 6:27

We're going to do some EV testing and we were able to get some quick wins, because what happens is, on your way to a hundred million, you're going to get stuck at 25. You're going to get stuck at 30. You're going to get stuck at 50. One or two months pass by, you're frustrated, and I didn't want to wait for an agency up or something. We did do qualitative research, we did talk to our customers. We had research from Google itself, for example, on payments. Payments was something else that you know what, if you're in Germany, for example, they they didn't at the time that made a change. They wanted to pay with debit cards and that didn't help them a lot.

Alex Montas 7:05

There's so much to your Facebook ads performance right, and that is also a matter of understanding your audience right. In Brazil it was very mobile, so matching those maybe I'll change it from brands and payments to insights about how your audience buy it was, I think, was like a game changer. That, when we mash it, what we're doing on the channels, messaging and things like that was like the big unlock for us and that was the one thing that actually, when I went to my next position also, I was able to replicate. I think it's something that if you are doing things at scale, if you do have a high velocity product, there's a lot to do with the price of the product.

Eric Eden 7:47

Makes a lot of sense. Even if you were focused just on the US market, I've seen a lot of a whole nother level of seven-dimensional chess, because in every country, the unit economics can be different, the pricing can be different, the offers you need to make could be different, and so each country being, in my experience let's call it 30 or 40% different. It creates a lot of complexities, but it does offer a lot of opportunity for growth, right.

Alex Montas 8:33

It does. And, honestly, the way that I did it to simplify things and the way that I think about it, is that I created regions, so I have five different pricing tiers as opposed to all of these different countries. And then I want to go back to your example of making real changes just in the US. After I left Bloomberg, my next company was a much longer company around let's just say, 4 million in revenue and we'll call it estimate because I'm not quite allowed to reveal but we made changes in the pricing page. But we made changes in the pricing page. That was also a very US space where we focused more on the annual thing. We got 30% bump in revenue that year. This year I did the same thing with a publisher in the US focusing on hash funds and very different business and very different business.

Alex Montas 9:32

And what I try to do is, for me, a lot of my strategy is you have to enter right, to go to top of funnel where you're doing the nice branding, the nice space, the nice creator. But I'm like we can get our bottom of the funnel in the right place. We can get our mid-bottle as they email it. We can get our messaging, our pricing and packaging in the same thing this year with the publisher, I corrected that we're seeing 50% year over year and what happens is right in terms of the bulk. So that is a 100% bulk. I wanted people to grow and now I need to grow at the top of the funnel and that's where the Facebook which, by the way, facebook came back. There were a few years where it wasn't the case. You know we've had issues with iOS 14. This year, I'm seeing it again as a great shadow to provide growth for many businesses.

Eric Eden 10:17

Even me too. Wow, so you're saying, facebook is coming back.

Alex Montas 10:22

Why is that? I think they figure out this all after iOS 14. The whole focus of creative, like their whole focus on AI, where probably they cannot tell that you went to this other website, they can more or less get some other data using a conversion API. I think they've gotten very good at using AI to see this person at an event on your website. Ie, they clicked on the trial, they signed up as a user Instead of I think in the past they relied on okay, we have data of all of the different websites.

Alex Montas 11:00

Figure it out right and, like they, maybe they made a tracking process to website. I think what's happening now is they take your own website information. They take other websites, information that's been provided by other websites. They go like these two people are similar and those are lighter to buy. So I'm thinking that was going on and I think obviously the emphasis is going back to how old school marketing was right. The old is New York head. Now Facebook is very much based on better. Creatives are winning. So I think those two factors is what's giving it a return.

Eric Eden 11:35

That's very interesting, because the targeting was so good before the iOS 14 update that if that had just continued I'd be like retired on a beach right now, because it was such low cost for the ROI you were getting, because it was such low cost for the ROI you were getting. And I think that when they lost that tracking for the last couple of years it's been that Facebook advertising is just a lot more expensive because the targeting hasn't been there. I love the thesis that the combination of great creative, the lookalike models powered by AI, could be bringing back some of the golden era. If you will, that's great. I'll have to look into that.

Alex Montas 12:21

And I don't know if it's quite the golden era, because I think there are going to be less winners. But now you have to be a better market. I think in the past and I was one of those people you would just get on, you would just put anything and it would just work. So I think now, really because you have to focus on the creative, you have mess winners, but the winners that are there are people that are actually really going out there and doing great work. So you know that's it. Know we may not be able to retire the way we were doing it before, but people with skill are finding their way around the platform.

Emerging Marketing Channels

Eric Eden 12:59

It seems like you still may be able to retire from doing amazing marketing, but you might just have to be a little bit less lazy, might be a little bit more on it in terms of Mad Men and use your creative skills, and I love that aspect of use the great creative in combination. Meta is investing a lot in AI, so that logically makes sense to me that they're not. Meta is very aware of what's going on with AI and they're investing billions and billions into it, like the other big tech companies, so this makes a lot of sense. But let me ask you are there other channels that you're broadly excited about this year, in addition to the Facebook Renaissance? David?

Alex Montas 13:45

Pérez LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is. I think LinkedIn the way to go in is. It may become even good for B2C. I think they're focusing on video and once you go onto video, you need to focus on passbooks and things like that, and it's making it really easy. I think in the past it was mostly and it still is, to a sense, it's mostly B2B, but this year, with one of my clients, we're seeing a lot of, for example, performance with a product that is only $50 per month and that says that it's target towards professionals. So that's still it is. In a way, it's a B2B, but it is a fast-moving B2B. When I tried this back when I was at Bloomberg, it wasn't as effective, but this year I'm seeing a lot of movement, a lot of organic movement there, so I'm excited towards what's happening on LinkedIn. That, compared to TikTok, yeah, I think it could be a great place to advertise and move a lot more levers, and the combination of organic, I think, is coming up to a really good place.

Eric Eden 14:54

Do you think that the combination of LinkedIn organic with being able to boost some of that with paid ads is an interesting strategy? Some other people have been telling me that they think that's an unlock with LinkedIn in particular, that you can do a post on LinkedIn that's organic and then put some money behind it. What do you think about strategies like that?

Alex Montas 15:18

I think it does work really well. Basically, it's becoming more of a person-to-person kind of company and at that point we're becoming very similar to Facebook. They said that I am planning next week, in terms of my product launch, I'm thinking of creating an UGC video guide and then I'm going to boost that and that is sounding very much like what you do on Facebook content. And that's precisely where LinkedIn is going. I think they are broadening their audiences because they set it up for a place where people are building audiences. People are going in there every day. Set it up for a place where people are building audiences. People are going in there every day. That is the now me as an advertiser to target to just have broader products. So I'm excited about where it's going. I think on an organic standpoint, it's different a little bit, but it's probably because they want to reach the ad platform better.

Eric Eden 16:13

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, in terms of channels that I'm excited about, podcasting is obviously one of them. I think that it's interesting from a content perspective because, in some ways, superior to blog posts and articles, things like that emotion comes through a lot more clearly from the voice. You can hear when people are smiling, you can hear when they're frustrated, and I think it is a content medium, has some room to be powerful, and I'm also pretty excited about the evolutions at YouTube.

Eric Eden 16:52

I think Google's done a lot to make it the number two website on the internet. I think it's got 2 billion to make it the number two website on the internet. I think it's got 2 billion people a month watching videos more than Netflix and I think that there's 51 million YouTube channels out there, and that blows my mind that there's that many creators that are pumping out hundreds, thousands of videos on YouTube. I just think that's really fascinating because a lot of people like to watch videos and video clips to absorb information over over reading. I think it's interesting. Well, what do you think?

Alex Montas 17:29

I wouldn't have to debate you on podcasts, but I wanted to agree with the YouTube part. I think I actually I was prior. I was also the head of marketing at TubeBuddy, which is biggest growth app. Basically, it's an app that helps optimize YouTube channels. First of all, the advantages of it it helps your SEO. If you have a video and then you do a blog post with it, it just does what there is to combine because it gives Google more sales. I do think that it is in terms of YouTube Shorts I have been testing YouTube Shorts and TikToks. The discovery they're getting as many views on YouTube that they're getting on TikTok. So I think that.

Alex Montas 18:12

YouTube is getting there in terms of getting that short game in place. So I think YouTube is a place to invest and I think if you are a marketer, a solopreneur, a company, whatever it is you say I want to do YouTube for a year, this is a great place for you to invest. You don't have to put a year because it takes time. Now, podcasts I think podcasts I feel a little more nuanced about. I had a CEO, as most of the CMOs do, and getting them to understand the value of a podcast is very tough because you expect an audience day one. That's very difficult, or on day 60, or on day 150.

Alex Montas 18:56

However, there are so many different benefits. I mean the fact that you can come up with a test script, the fact that you can literally do AVM. You can actually meet with your clients and build a relationship with them. There's something beautiful about podcasts, but I think it's quite difficult to build a big audience Unless you're combining it with YouTube, unless you're combining it with these other things, unless you already have an assistant distribution chair. I have 12,000 followers on LinkedIn, so I think for me it makes a little bit more sense to do the podcast and distribute it. So I'd love to hear your thoughts there because obviously we're on a podcast. We both can see the value we're spending our time for today, but there's this nuanced value in the sense that it's especially me trying to bring that value to CEOs and founders. I don't know if they get that. There is value shown by content creation. There is value shown by being in a podcast with your client, with your IT people, but audience is a little bit more difficult. It's actually difficult to build on a podcast.

Eric Eden 20:05

Yeah, I think both for YouTube and podcasting the motion of tactics is very different and both of them take time. So you said it takes a year to build on YouTube. I think podcasts may take a couple years to build, but it depends on your strategy and your tactics of. Podcasts will take a couple years to build if you're only doing one episode a week. Just from a content library perspective, podcasting and YouTube that, I think, set the most successful ones apart from the other ones as well.

Eric Eden 20:44

There's definitely a lot of things with YouTube that you need to do in order to get your videos seen. I use TubeBuddy. I love it, but you have to do in YouTube, for example, really good thumbnails to get good views. You have to optimize the descriptions for SEO, you have to write good titles and there's just a lot of things there that you have to do in order to be successful on YouTube. I see a lot of channels that put up 100 videos and got no views. Just because you put up videos, you don't get views on YouTube, and the same is true in podcasting. Just because you push out episodes doesn't mean that you're going to get great results.

Eric Eden 21:15

You have to think through the marketing and you have to be a marketer and you have to do the right things in podcasting too, like you have to have the right titles for the episodes and you had to package them, and you have to write good show descriptions and you have to market the podcast across different channels. You can't just hope that people find it in the Apple podcasts right. So I think there's a lot of tactics. Like you were saying about Facebook at the very beginning, to make a channel successful is required. Sometimes it's pricing and sometimes for these other channels in B2B, like podcasting and YouTube, the tactics you have to work on are not necessarily pricing, but it's the packaging of the content. So I think it's very interesting to see how these will evolve. Are there any final thoughts you'd like to share? For marketers and entrepreneurs who want to grow their business to $100 million, like you've successfully done several times? What advice would you give people who want to go on that journey, done several times?

Testing, Focusing, and Experimenting for Success

Alex Montas 22:17

what advice would you give people who want to go on that journey? Yeah, I think my final piece of advice is and as we were seeing throughout the conversation, there's no silver bullet. We cannot go on to Facebook and inspect and get results. We cannot go on YouTube and inspect and get results. We cannot change our price and inspect and get results. Right, I think that what you got to do is test everything, choose one or two things to do really well and I think, if anything, what we've talked about today is a few years ago, back in 2015, back in 2019, when I gave my success story, you could be lazy. You could be a gray at targeting. That's no longer the case today. Be really good at one or two or three things, and then the rest will follow. So, no silver bullets, just be good.

Eric Eden 23:03

I love it. I think that's great advice and I agree there isn't a silver bullet. I think looking across different channels, tactics within those channels, like we've talked about today, picking one or two to really focus on, that makes the most sense for your business, experimenting and testing these are the keys to success, to getting that outcome of $100 million in revenue. So thank you very much for being with us today, sharing your stories, your insights and your advice. We really appreciate it. Thanks for being on the show today my pleasure. Thank you so much.